The gunmen opened fire on two Orthodox churches, a synagogue and a police post in two cities, according to the authorities.

Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee described the attacks in the predominantly Muslim region with a history of armed militancy as terrorist acts.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were declared days of mourning in the region.

Russia-Ukraine War 6 hours ago

Russia blames U.S. for Ukrainian strikes that kill at least 5 and injure dozens in Crimea

news Jun 19

Russia and North Korea sign partnership deal that includes mutual defense pact, Putin says

Dagestan’s Interior Ministry said a group of armed men shot at a synagogue and a church in the city of Derbent, located on the Caspian Sea. Both the church and the synagogue caught fire, according to state media. Almost simultaneously, reports appeared about an attack on a church and a traffic police post in the Dagestan capital, Makhachkala.

The authorities announced a counter-terrorist operation in the region. The Anti-Terrorist Committee said five gunmen were “eliminated.” The governor said six “bandits” had been “liquidated.” The conflicting numbers couldn’t be immediately reconciled and it wasn’t clear how many militants were involved in the attacks.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. The authorities launched a criminal probe on the charge of a terrorist act.

Russian state news agency Tass cited law enforcement sources as saying that a Dagestani official was detained over his sons’ involvement in the attacks.

The trial is being held behind closed doors in Yekaterinburg, in the same court that next week is to begin hearing the case of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in March 2023 and charged with espionage.

The defendant was identified by Russian authorities as Los Angeles resident Ksenia Karelina, although U.S. media reports frequently use the surname Khavana, the name of her ex-husband.

Karelina was born in Yekaterinburg and was arrested in February while visiting her family.

Russian authorities detain Los Angeles woman on suspicion of treason

Russia’s main domestic security agency, the Federal Security Service, charges that Karelina raised money for a Ukrainian organization that was providing weapons, ammunition and other supplies to the Ukrainian military. Her boyfriend has said she made a single donation of about $50 to a Ukrainian organization, according to media reports.

Karelina faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Almost all Russian criminal cases that make it to court end in convictions. The trial was adjourned in the afternoon and the next session was set for Aug. 7, Russian news agencies said.

Gershkovich, the highest-profile American behind bars in Russia, is accused of gathering secret information from a tank factory in Nizhny Tagil, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Yekaterinburg. His employers deny the allegation, and the U.S. State Department has declared him to be wrongfully detained.

Gershkovich’s trial, also closed, is to begin next Wednesday.

Crime and Courts Jun 19

Russian court sentences US soldier to nearly 4 years on theft charges

news Jun 14

Russia's Putin sets out conditions for peace talks with Ukraine

A journalist for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with U.S. and Russian dual citizenship has been held since October on charges of gathering military information and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Since sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has sharply cracked down on dissent and has passed laws that criminalize criticism of the operation in Ukraine and remarks considered to discredit the Russian military. Concern has risen since then that Russia could be targeting U.S. nationals for arrest.

US journalist detained in Russia

The deal, which the leaders said covered areas including security, trade, investment, and cultural and humanitarian ties, could mark the strongest connection between Moscow and Pyongyang since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Both leaders described it as a major upgrade of their ties.

The two met as Putin visited North Korea for the first time in 24 years. The summit came as the U.S. and its allies express growing concerns over an arms arrangement in which the country provides Moscow with badly needed munitions for its war in Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that could enhance the threat posed by Kim’s nuclear weapons and missile program.

Kim said that the deal was the “strongest ever treaty” between the two nations, putting the relationship at the level of an alliance, and vowed full support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin said that it was a “breakthough document” reflecting shared desire to move relations to a higher level.

The North Korean leader gave Putin a lavish welcome, meeting him at the airport Tuesday night, where the two shook hands, hugged twice and then rode together in a limousine in a huge motorcade that rolled through the capital’s brightly illuminated streets, where buildings were decorated with giant Russian flags and portraits of Putin.

After spending the rest of the night at a state guest house, Putin attended a welcoming ceremony at the city’s main square, filled with what appeared to be tens of thousands of spectators, including children holding balloons and people wearing coordinated t-shirts in the red, white and blue of the Russian and North Korean flags. Huge crowds lined up on the streets to greet Putin’s motorcade, chanting “Welcome Putin” and waving flowers and North Korean and Russian flags.

Putin and Kim saluted an honor guard and walked across a red carpet. Kim then introduced key members of his leadership including Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui; top aide and ruling party secretary Jo Yong Won; and the leader’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong.

news Jun 14

Russia's Putin sets out conditions for peace talks with Ukraine

news Jun 4

Moscow derides peace summit; Ukraine says using Western weapons to strike Russia could be a game changer

As the talks began, Putin thanked Kim for North Korea’s support for his war in Ukraine, part of what he said was a “fight against the imperialist hegemonistic policies of the U.S. and its satellites against the Russian Federation.”

Putin hailed ties that he traced back to the Soviet army fighting the Japanese military on the Korean Peninsula in the closing moments of World War II, and Moscow’s support for Pyongyang during the Korean War.

Kim said Moscow and Pyongyang’s “fiery friendship” is now even closer than during Soviet times, and promised “full support and solidarity to the Russian government, army and people in carrying out the special military operation in Ukraine to protect sovereignty, security interests and territorial integrity.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what that support might look like. Kim has used similar language in the past, consistently saying North Korea supports what he describes as a just action to protect Russia’s interests and blaming the crisis on the U.S.-led West’s “hegemonic policy.”

North Korea is under heavy U.N. Security Council sanctions over its weapons program, while Russia also faces sanctions by the United States and its Western partners over its aggression in Ukraine.

U.S. and South Korean officials accuse the North of providing Russia with artillery, missiles and other military equipment for use in Ukraine, possibly in return for key military technologies and aid. Both Pyongyang and Moscow deny accusations about North Korean weapons transfers, which would violate multiple U.N. Security Council sanctions that Russia previously endorsed.

Along with China, Russia has provided political cover for Kim’s continuing efforts to advance his nuclear arsenal, repeatedly blocking U.S.-led efforts to impose fresh U.N. sanctions on the North over its weapons tests.

In March, a Russian veto at the United Nations ended monitoring of U.N. sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program, prompting Western accusations that Moscow is seeking to avoid scrutiny as it buys weapons from Pyongyang for use in Ukraine.

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Pyongyang that the two leaders exchanged gifts after the talks. Putin presented Kim with a Russian-made Aurus limo and other gifts, including a tea set and a naval officer’s dagger. Ushakov said that Kim’s presents to Putin included artworks depicting the Russian leader.

Russia media said earlier that Kim will host a reception, and Putin is expected to leave Wednesday evening for Vietnam.

In addition to security, Putin said the partnership includes cooperation in political, trade, investment, cultural and humanitarian fields, as well as security. He added that Russia would not rule out developing military-technical cooperation with North Korea under the deal.

According to the Kremlin’s website, the two leaders also signed an agreement on building a road bridge on their shared border, and another on cooperation in healthcare, medical education and science.

Kim was quoted as saying that the agreement was of a peaceful and defensive nature. “I have no doubt it will become a driving force accelerating the creation of a new multipolar world,” he was quoted to say.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Putin’s visit to North Korea illustrates how Russia tries, “in desperation, to develop and to strengthen relations with countries that can provide it with what it needs to continue the war of aggression that it started against Ukraine.”

The North may also seek to increase labor exports to Russia and other illicit activities to gain foreign currency in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions, according to a recent report by the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea’s main spy agency. There will likely be talks about expanding cooperation in agriculture, fisheries and mining and further promoting Russian tourism to North Korea, the institute said.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, with the pace of both Kim’s weapons tests and combined military exercises involving the United States, South Korea and Japan intensifying in a tit-for-tat cycle.

The Koreas also have engaged in Cold War-style psychological warfare that involved North Korea dropping tons of trash on the South with balloons, and the South broadcasting anti-North Korean propaganda with its loudspeakers.

Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

The trial is to be held in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.

The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.

The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

Russia Jun 13

Reporter Evan Gershkovich to stand trial in Russia on espionage charges, officials say

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich’s release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.

Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, has been jailed since October awaiting trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

Separately, U.S. soldier Gordon Black is on trial in Vladivostok on charges of theft and threatening murder in a dispute with a Russian woman. Black, who was stationed in South Korea but visiting the Pacific Coast city, on Monday told a court that he denied the allegation of threatening murder but “partially” admitted to theft, according to the state news agency RIA-Novosti.

An indictment of The Wall Street Journal reporter has been finalized and his case was filed to the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) east of Moscow, according to Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office. There was no word on when the trial would begin.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility in the Sverdlovsk region that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said in a statement, revealing for the first time the details of the accusations against him.

Gershkovich was detained while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the United States. The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, alleged after arresting Gershkovich that he was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

The U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller slammed the development, saying there was “absolutely zero credibility to those charges” and adding that the U.S. government would continue to work to bring Gershkovich home.

“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” Miller said. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”

Russia Apr 17, 2023

US Ambassador Visits Reporter Accused by Russia of Spying

news Apr 10, 2023

State Department Designates Evan Gershkovich Wrongfully Detained by Russia; U.S. Grapples With Fallout From Intelligence Leak

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate his release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a verdict in his trial.

“Russia’s latest move toward a sham trial is, while expected, deeply disappointing and still no less outrageous,” a statement by Almar Latour, Dow Jones CEO and publisher of the Journal, and Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor in chief, said.

They added that the charges against Gershkovich were “false and baseless.”

“The Russian regime’s smearing of Evan is repugnant, disgusting and based on calculated and transparent lies. Journalism is not a crime. Evan’s case is an assault on free press,” the statement said. “We had hoped to avoid this moment and now expect the U.S. government to redouble efforts to get Evan released.”

Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s special presidential envoy who serves as the U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator, said that though he had been hopeful about striking a deal to get Gershkovich home before this point, the latest development “doesn’t slow or stop us down.”

“The bottom line is, this was not unexpected,” he said.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believed a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany, which appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked last week by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies in St. Petersburg that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.

Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

He was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich was fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been held at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a notorious czarist-era prison used during Josef Stalin’s purges, when executions were carried out in its basement.

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

Since sending troops to Ukraine, Russian authorities have detained several U.S. nationals and other Westerners, seemingly bolstering that idea.

The report tracks what it calls “prolific Russian influence actors” that last summer began focusing on disparaging the 2024 Olympic Games and French President Emmanuel Macron, including by posting a bogus documentary featuring a deepfake of actor Tom Cruise.

“These ongoing Russian influence operations have two central objectives: to denigrate the reputation of the [International Olympic Committee] on the world stage; and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games,” the report says.

Most recently, the Russian campaign has sought to capitalize on the Israel-Hamas war by impersonating militants and fabricating threats against Israelis who attending the 2024 Games, the report found. Some images referenced the attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team and a West German police officer.

The fake documentary, posted online last summer, was titled “Olympics Has Fallen,” a play on the 2013 movie “Olympus Has Fallen.” Designed to resemble a Netflix production, it used AI-generated audio resembling Cruise’s voice to imply his participation, the report says, and even attached sham five-star reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the BBC.

YouTube took it down at the behest of the International Olympic Committee, but it remains available on Telegram, Microsoft says.

“The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recently been faced with a number of fake news posts targeting the IOC,” the committee said in a statement last fall, citing “an entire documentary produced with defamatory content, a fake narrative and false information, using an AI-generated voice of a world-renowned Hollywood actor.”

The Russian campaign also put out videos designed to look like news reports that suggested intelligence about credible threats of violence at the Paris Games, Microsoft found.

One video that purported to be a report from media outlet Euronews in Brussels falsely claimed that Parisians were buying property insurance in anticipation of terrorism.

In another spoofed news clip impersonating French broadcaster France 24, the Russian campaign falsely claimed that 24% of purchased tickets for Olympic events had been returned due to fears of terrorism.

A third Russian effort consisted of a fake video news release from the CIA and France’s main intelligence agency warning potential attendees to stay away from the 2024 Olympics due to the alleged risk of a terror attack.

Microsoft says Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has a long history of attacking the Olympics.

“If they cannot participate in or win the Games, then they seek to undercut, defame, and degrade the international competition in the minds of participants, spectators, and global audiences,” the report says. “The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Summer Games held in Los Angeles and sought to influence other countries to do the same.”

At the time, according to Microsoft, U.S. officials linked Soviet actors to a campaign that covertly distributed leaflets to Olympic committees in countries including Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and South Korea, claiming that nonwhite competitors would be targeted by American extremists if they went to Los Angeles.

In 2017, the IOC banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Games after finding widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes.

But the current ban is over the war in Ukraine. The committee decided that qualifying athletes from Russia and close ally Belarus may compete in the 2024 Summer Games only as “individual neutral athletes,” prohibited from flying their national flags.

Microsoft said the online influence campaign picked up shortly afterward.

The Russian Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Staff Sgt. Gordon Black was arrested in the eastern city of Vladivostok earlier this month and placed in pre-trial detention.

Now he has “admitted guilt and is cooperating with the investigation,” state news agency Tass reported Wednesday, citing local law enforcement agencies.

Separately, the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Primorsky Territory told the privately-owned Interfax news agency that Black, 34, had confessed to his crime.

Black was charged with “theft causing significant damage.” Tass reported that he was talking to the authorities in English via an interpreter.

Black was stationed in South Korea and was due to travel to a U.S. Army base in Texas when he made an unscheduled visit to Russia to visit a women he was romantically involved with, U.S. officials said shortly after his arrest.

Russia May 9

Mom of captured US soldier Gordon Black says girlfriend ‘lured' him to Russia

Russia May 6

US soldier detained in Russia and accused of stealing, officials say

Black’s mother, Melody Jones, told NBC News last week that her son had been “lured” to Russia by the woman, whom she named as Aleksandra Vashchuk. “I think she convinced him to come there,” Jones said in a video interview from her home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “He wanted to see her for the last time before going home, and so he went there.”

Black’s wife, Megan Black also called on Russian authorities to release him through a statement from her attorney. Even though she is in the process of divorcing him, Brett Pritchard, said that securing Black’s freedom would provide comfort to Black’s six-year-old daughter.

Black met the 32-year-old Russian woman while she was working in South Korea as revealed in a series of TikTok videos that surfaced after his arrest. Found by Radio Free Europe, the woman said in the videos that she lived in South Korea for five years.

Army spokesperson Cynthia O. Smith said earlier this month that Black, who enlisted as an infantryman in 2008 and has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, did not have clearance to visit Russia.

Singh also said the Army was “looking into” whether Russian intelligence had targeted Black.

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Melody Jones said she thinks her son, Staff Sgt. Gordon Black, was set up by his girlfriend, whom she identified as Aleksandra Vashchuk.

“I think she convinced him to come there,” Jones said in a video interview from her home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “He wanted to see her for the last time before going home, and so he went there.”

The Russians detained Black, 34, on theft charges last week after he traveled from the military base in South Korea where he had been stationed to the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok.

A Defense Department spokesperson said Tuesday that the Army is investigating whether Russia’s intelligence services specifically targeted Black.

“There is an administrative investigation underway to determine the facts and circumstances around his travel,” deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a news conference Tuesday.

Black is an experienced soldier with 16 years of service who was supposed to be traveling to Fort Cavazos, Texas, to start a new assignment, the military said.

Asked why Black would risk traveling to a country where other Americans are being held against their will, Jones gave a one-word answer.

“Her,” she said. “He met her in the bar where she was working, and they’ve been together, on and off, for about a year and a half. I’ve never met her in person, but I’ve spoken to her over Messenger. My motherly instincts told me something was wrong with her.”

Jones said her son, who is in the midst of a divorce, “is a good boy with a cute, crooked smile.”

“He was a good soldier, too,” and he speaks fluent Russian, she said. 

But Vashchuk had some kind of hold over him, she said. 

“I was talking about it with my husband, and we don’t know what it is,” Jones said. “Why would she latch on to him?”

On Tuesday, Radio Free Europe found what it says is the TikTok account of a woman who posted several videos of her apparently with Black in South Korea in 2022 and 2023. The woman said in the videos that she lived in South Korea for five years.

Jones said that woman appeared to be Vashchuk.

The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry office in Vladivostok has said Black’s detention had nothing to do with politics or espionage.

Black didn’t have Defense Department clearance to visit Russia, nor is there any indication that he planned to stay there, Army spokesperson Cynthia O. Smith said earlier Tuesday.

“Instead of returning to the continental United States, Black flew from Incheon, Republic of Korea through China to Vladivostok, Russia, for personal reasons,” Smith said in a statement.

When Black landed in Vladivostok, he was charged with “secretly stealing property” of a person referred to as “citizen T” and ordered held until at least July 2, Pervomaisky District Court spokeswoman Elena Oleneva said in a statement Tuesday.

The court confirmed that Black would be held for at least two months.

Jones said her son told her he was in civilian clothing when he was pulled off the plane and interrogated for several hours.

Black, who grew up in a small town in southern Illinois, enlisted in the Army as an infantryman in 2008, Smith said. From October 2009 through September 2010, he served in Iraq, Smith said. He also served in Afghanistan from June 2013 until March 2014.

Most recently, Smith said, Black was assigned to the Eighth Army and based at Camp Humphreys in South Korea, which is the largest overseas U.S. military installation in the world.

On April 10, Black was “out-processed” and given two weeks to get to Texas, Smith said.

Current travel guidance from the State Department advises against all travel to Russia.

Jones said her son told her he planned to stop in Vladivostok before he flew to Texas. 

“I was worried about him going, because the government there has been grabbing Americans,” she said. 

The captive Americans include Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was jailed in March 2023, and former Marine Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018. 

“I told him not to go,” Jones said. “I was more worried about him going to Russia than I was when he was in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Jones said her son texted her after he was detained.

“The last thing I got from his was ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m OK,’” she said. 

Jones said her son listed her as his emergency contact and that’s why she got the call from the State Department on Thursday that he had been arrested by the Russians. She said that she hasn’t heard from anybody since then and that she’s not sure whether his wife has been in touch with the military. 

“They have a 6½-year-old daughter,” Jones said. “And she misses her daddy.”

Jones said Black isn’t her only son. She has two others, as well as a daughter. So she won’t be alone on Mother’s Day.

“Gordon used to call me at least once a week,” she said. “And he usually sends me flowers on Mother’s Day. The last time it was two dozen red roses. But I guess not this year.”

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The soldier, Staff Sgt. Gordon Black, had been stationed in South Korea and traveled to Russia on his own and not on official business, according to four U.S. officials.

He had finished his deployment and was heading back to the U.S. when he made a side trip to Vladivostok, Russia, to visit a woman he was romantically involved with, officials said. They added that he had traveled there without permission from his superiors and is now being held in pre-trial confinement.

The soldier is accused of stealing from a woman, the officials said. It was not immediately clear if it was the same woman he was visiting.

The soldier was detained Thursday, U.S. Army spokesperson Cynthia O. Smith said in a statement.

Smith said the soldier was apprehended in Vladivostok “on charges of criminal misconduct.”

“The Russian Federation notified the U.S. Department of State of the criminal detention in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” Smith said. “The Army notified his family and the U.S. Department of State is providing appropriate consular support to the Soldier in Russia. Given the sensitivity of this matter, we are unable to provide additional details at this time.”

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he is “deeply concerned” by reports that a soldier was detained in Russia.

“Putin has a long history of holding American citizens hostage,” McCaul said in a post shared on X. “A warning to all Americans—as the State Department has said, it is not safe to travel to Russia.”

Current travel guidance from the U.S. State Department restricts travel for citizens to Russia. “Exercise increased caution due to the risk of wrongful detentions,” according to the State Department advisory. The Pentagon also restricts travel for Defense Department personnel.

Black is one of a number of Americans detained in Russia, including several civilians.

Arrests of Americans in Russia have increased as the relationship between the two countries has sunk to Cold War lows, The Associated Press reported. The U.S. has accused Russia of targeting Americans and using them as bargaining chips, according to the AP.

Among the most prominent U.S. citizens to be detained are Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was jailed last March, and former Marine Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018. The U.S. government has said that both Gershkovich and Whelan are wrongfully detained.

WNBA star Brittney Griner spent 10 months in Russian penal colonies for drug-related charges but was released in a rare prisoner exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2022.

This is a developing story.

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The miners got trapped on March 18 at a depth of about 400 feet when part of the mine collapsed in the Zeysk district of the Amur region, about 3,000 miles east of the capital, Moscow.

About 200 rescuers used powerful pumps to try to take out water that flooded the mine, posing a challenge to the salvage operation.

Regional authorities and the mine operator announced the termination of rescue efforts on Monday, saying the mine remained flooded and that more of its sections could collapse, jeopardizing emergency responders.

The company that operates the mine, one of Russia’s largest, said it would pay compensation to victims’ families.

Officials have not said what caused the accident. Most mining accidents in the past have been blamed on violations of safety rules.

Separately, one worker died in an explosion that caused a rock collapse in an iron mine in Russia’s central Sverdlovsk region on Monday, news agencies reported, cited the regional health ministry. The reports said the explosion was a planned operation and took place about 338 meters (1,080 feet) underground.

Five miners were trapped in the blast at the mine in Krasnoturinsk, 1,370 kilometers (850 miles) east of Moscow. Three of those brought to the surface were hospitalized in serious condition, the reports said.

That addition to the register followed a Russian Supreme Court court ruling last year that cracked down on gay and transgender people in the country.

While the register also lists al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, an affiliate of which claimed responsibility for the concert hall attack, the inclusion of LGBTQ+ activists raised questions about how Russia’s vast security services evaluate threats to the country.

The March 22 attack that killed over 140 people marked a major security failure under President Vladimir Putin, who came to power 24 years ago by taking a tough line against those he labeled terrorists from the Russian region of Chechnya waging a bloody insurgency.

The lapse in security has led many to wonder how gunmen could easily kill so many people at a public event. One week after the massacre, here’s a look at what’s behind the failure to prevent the concert hall attack and the government’s chaotic response to it:

news Mar 27

Ukraine war updates: Russia says it's ‘hard to believe' Islamic State group behind terror attack; death toll rises to 140

news Mar 27

Russia claimed the West, Kyiv ordered the Moscow terror attack. Now it has the problem of proving it

A FOCUS ON STIFLING DISSENT

Russia’s massive security apparatus has focused in recent years on stifling the political opposition, independent media and civil society groups in the harshest crackdown since Soviet times. The repressions have only intensified after the invasion of Ukraine.

Individual protesters are swiftly quashed by riot police. After the Feb. 16 death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, mourners bringing flowers and candles to makeshift memorials were quickly detained. Surveillance cameras with facial recognition software are widely used.

Many opposition groups have been branded as “extremists” -– a designation that carries long prison terms for anyone associated with them.

Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, and his political network is on the register of extremist and terrorist organizations, just like the LGBTQ+ “movement” that on March 22 was added to the register of Russia’s state watchdog for financial crimes.

Top Navalny associate Leonid Volkov, who lives abroad, said the security agencies are too busy with the political crackdown to pay attention to terrorism threats.

“They like inventing fictitious terrorists — those who think or love differently — so they don’t have time for real ones,” he said on his messaging app channel.

Many security officers are focused on suspected Ukrainian agents and fending off sabotage and other attacks by Ukraine in the 2-year-old war. They also are scouring social media for signs of anti-war sentiment.

After the attack, law enforcement agencies followed a familiar pattern of repression, detaining people over social media posts about it that authorities deemed offensive.

Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said security forces focused on Kremlin critics but have proven inadequate in tackling real threats to the country.

“This machine can’t be effective when it has to perform its direct function to ensure citizens’ security,” he wrote in a commentary, noting Putin has had nearly a quarter- century to ensure “stability and security, but instead he ruined both.”

A U.S. WARNING DISMISSED AS ‘BLACKMAIL’

The U.S. government said it told Russia in early March about an imminent attack under the “duty to warn” rule that obliges U.S. intelligence officials to share such information, even with adversaries. It was unclear how specific it was.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also issued a public notice March 7 advising Americans to avoid crowds in the capital over the next 48 hours due to “imminent” plans by extremists to target large gatherings, including concerts.

With Russia-U.S. relations at their lowest point since the Cold War, Moscow was likely to treat any such tip with suspicion. Three days before the attack, Putin dismissed the U.S. Embassy notice as an attempt to scare or intimidate Russians and blackmail the Kremlin.

Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said the U.S. warning was general and didn’t help track down the attackers. He said the FSB, acting on the tip, targeted some suspects but it proved wrong.

Putin and other officials tried to divert attention from the security failure by seeking to link the attack to Ukraine despite Kyiv’s emphatic denials and the Islamic State affiliate’s claim of responsibility.

In a persistent attempt to blame Kyiv, investigators alleged the attackers had received cash and cryptocurrency from Ukraine and arrested a man accused of involvement in the transfers. They didn’t provide any evidence.

A BUNGLED INITIAL RESPONSE

It took anti-terrorism units at least a half-hour to reach the concert hall after hearing of the attack. By that time, the gunmen had fled after setting fire to the venue.

The security forces’ arrival at the concert hall on Moscow’s outer ring road was delayed by rush hour traffic, and it took them time to assess the situation as concertgoers fled.

Police said they were able to check security video before the building was destroyed and quickly saw the gunmen. Cameras caught them arriving at the hall and then departing in a white Renault. Russian media said the car was continuously caught by traffic cameras as it sped from Moscow.

It wasn’t immediately clear why authorities allowed them to drive more than 370 kilometers (over 230 miles) southwest before finally arresting them about 140 kilometers (86 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

A CONFUSING AND MIXED KREMLIN MESSAGE

After the Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan claimed responsibility, Putin at first did not mention the group on the day after the attack. On Monday, he acknowledged “radical Islamists” were behind the attack but also repeated — without evidence — that Ukraine and the West were likely involved. Those allegations were echoed by his security chiefs.

He and his lieutenants said the arrest of the four gunmen near Ukraine indicated Kyiv’s likely involvement, ignoring Ukrainian denials and the IS statement.

Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close Moscow ally, declared that he and Putin had discussed bolstering the Russia-Belarus border to prevent the attackers from crossing — muddling the Kremlin claims of a Ukrainian escape route.

A TROUBLED MANHUNT

The four suspects were detained, along with seven others, with a search for more accomplices underway. Putin also ordered investigators to find the masterminds, a task that appears challenging.

A senior Turkish security official said Tuesday that two of the four suspects spent a “short amount of time” in Turkey before traveling together to Russia on March 2.

In video released by Russian news outlets, one of the suspects told interrogators he had been contracted for the attack by an associate of an Islamic preacher who offered him 1 million rubles (about $10,800).

The veracity of the suspects’ statements has come into question after they showed signs of severe beatings. At a court hearing Sunday night, their faces appeared swollen and bruised. One had a heavily bandaged ear -– reportedly cut off during an interrogation — another had a plastic bag hanging over his neck and a third was in a wheelchair with his eyes closed, accompanied by medical personnel.

A POSSIBLE AFTERMATH

Putin’s allegations of Ukrainian involvement in the attack could set the stage for him to both raise the stakes in the war and to further tighten the crackdown on critics at home.

But he is unlikely to reshuffle the leadership of security agencies, despite the embarrassing blunders that led to the security lapses.

Putin is known to resent making personnel changes under pressure, which could make him look weak. During stage-managed televised meetings with top officials to discuss the attack, he avoided any criticism of their performance, indicating their jobs are safe at least for now.

With leading opposition activists in prison or abroad and independent media muzzled, Putin this month rode a stage-managed election landslide to another six years in power. That will keep him well-insulated from any public criticism.

Compliant lawmakers and state-controlled broadcasters and other media will continue to hammer home his message of Ukraine’s alleged role in the attack, distracting attention from the poor performance of law enforcement agencies.

On the anniversary of his detainment, his family is speaking to the media, hoping to shine more light on his plight in the hope that his release can be secured.

Gershkovich, 32, was in Moscow City Court on Tuesday, when a judge extended his detention until June 30, the fifth extension as he awaits trial. Photos released by the court show him smiling from the glass defendant’s box.

His parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, and older sister, Danielle Gershkovich, talked with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell this week.

The family was excited when he moved to Russia in 2017 and his parents visited him there, they said. 

“We saw Russia through his eyes,” his mother said. “We were with such a great guide to a new Russia that we didn’t experience before.”

Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Gershkovich moved from Moscow, where he had lived and reported for six years, to London but continued to report in Russia. 

Of his arrest while on a reporting trip to Central Russia, his father said, “It was numbing. It’s hard to feel anything. It’s hard to think about anything.” 

Now, his mother said, they are keeping themselves optimistic. “That’s the best way we can cope with it,” she said. “No pessimism.” 

There remains hope that Gershkovich will be released, and the most likely route appears to be through a prisoner swap, as was done to secure the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner in late 2022.

Here’s what to know about Evan Gershkovich’s case:

Who is Evan Gershkovich?

Gershkovich, the son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was raised in Princeton, New Jersey and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine.

The family spoke Russian at home, although Gershkovich said he learned most of his Russian while living in Moscow.

He was a news assistant for The New York Times, and a reporter for the independent news outlet Moscow Times and wire service Agence France-Presse before joining The Wall Street Journal in 2022. 

What was Evan Gershkovich reporting on when he was arrested?

Before his arrest, Gershkovich had been covering the war in Ukraine.

Gershkovich, who was accredited by Russia’s Foreign Ministry to work as a journalist, was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in central Russia.

At the time he was detained, he may have been reporting on the Russian mercenary military organization Wagner, as a Russian reporter familiar with his plans told NBC News.

The state-funded private military group played a large role in the Ukraine invasion and whose soldiers have repeatedly been accused of war crimes that include murder, torture and rape of civilians in areas it has occupied.

The group was also behind a failed rebellion against the Russian defense ministry that included a march toward Moscow in 2023.

US & World

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Why does Russia say Evan Gershkovich was arrested?

He was accused of espionage by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which alleged he was collecting “information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Russia has not released evidence for its allegation against Gershkovich and most of the court proceedings have been closed.

He was denied bail and is currently being held in Lefortovo prison, where political prisoners are often detained.

What is the U.S. government doing to free Evan Gershkovich?

Gershkovich is the first U.S. journalist to be held in Russia on an accusation of espionage since the end of the Cold War. 

President Joe Biden has called for his release, and U.S. diplomats are nearly always present when legal procedures happen in his case.

The United States government has publicly said he is not a spy and has never worked for the government and it has declared him to be “wrongfully detained,” a terminology that essentially means that America sees him as a political hostage.

Outside the courtroom on Tuesday, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, called the accusation against him “fiction.”

“Evan’s case is not about evidence, due process or rule of law,” she told journalists. “It is about using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

In a statement, The Wall Street Journal said, “It’s a ruling that ensures Evan will sit in a Russian prison well past one year. It was also Evan’s 12th court appearance, baseless proceedings that falsely portray him as something other than what he is — a journalist who was doing his job. He should never have been detained. Journalism is not a crime, and we continue to demand his immediate release.”

What has Vladimir Putin said about Evan Gershkovich’s detainment?

After the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he had agreed with the idea of a prisoner swap involving Navalny, Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, another American imprisoned in Russia.

Like Gershkovich, Whelan has been designated as wrongfully detained, meaning the U.S. government is committed to working for his release.

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Guards take the American journalist from the notorious Lefortovo Prison in a van for the short drive to the courthouse. He’s led in handcuffs to a defendants’ cage in front of a judge for yet another hearing about his pretrial detention on espionage charges.

The proceedings are always closed. His appeals are always rejected, and his time behind bars is always extended. Then it’s back to Lefortovo.

Gershkovich was arrested a year ago Friday while on a reporting trip for The Wall Street Journal to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, alleges he was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to support the accusation, which he, the Journal and the U.S. government deny. Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

The periodic court hearings give Gershkovich’s family, friends and U.S. officials a glimpse of him, and for the 32-year-old journalist, it’s a break from his otherwise largely monotonous prison routine.

“It’s always a mixed feeling. I’m happy to see him and that he’s doing well, but it’s a reminder that he is not with us. We want him at home,” Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, told The Associated Press.

Although Gershkovich is often seen smiling in the brief appearances in open court, friends and family say he finds it hard to face a wall of cameras pointing at him as if he were an animal in a zoo.

news Feb 9

Putin hints at swapping detained Wall Street Journal reporter for Russian prisoner

Jan 26

Pre-trial detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich extended through March

Ahead of the most recent one on Tuesday, Milman was particularly interested to see him. She was waiting, she said, for “a big reveal” — Gershkovich’s cellmate had given him a haircut.

But the hearing itself offered no new revelations on his case: He was ordered to remain behind bars pending trial at least until June 30 — the fifth extension of his detention.

When Gershkovich was arrested a year ago — the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War — it came as a shock, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after the invasion of Ukraine.

“He was accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry. There was nothing to suggest that this was going to happen,” said Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

“He absolutely loved it,” Milman said of her son’s life in Moscow.

He threw himself into work and became close friends with other reporters. They spent evenings, weekends and holidays together — at traditional Russian saunas, cycling around Moscow or having barbecues in the countryside.

Those friends are now among the most vocal advocates for his release.

“For us, it’s got to the level where if we can see Evan smiling in the courtroom — that stuff that brings us a lot of happiness. It’s reassuring that he’s still not been broken by it,” said Washington Post correspondent Francesca Ebel.

His supporters say that is remarkable, given that Gershkovich is being held in Lefortovo, a notorious czarist-era prison used during Josef Stalin’s purges, when executions were carried out in its basement.

Gershkovich is not allowed phone calls and wakes up “every morning to the same gray prison wall. … To think that he’s been doing that every day for the past year is just horrible,” said his friend, Polina Ivanova of the Financial Times.

He’s allowed out of his cell for a hour a day to exercise. He spends the rest of his time largely reading books in English and Russian and writing letters to friends and family who try to make sure he stays up to date with current affairs and gossip.

That includes following his favorite English soccer team, Arsenal, which is having one of its best seasons, even though scores usually get to him about two weeks late. Gershkovich can see only limited highlights on Russian TV but is kept up to date by his friend, Pjotr Sauer of the British newspaper, the Guardian.

“He is very happy about how Arsenal is playing but obviously upset he can’t see it for himself,” Sauer said.

Mikhail Gershkovich writes his son about chess strategy because his cellmate doesn’t like the game. They also discuss artificial intelligence because “he wants to be current when he comes back,” his father said.

No one knows when that might be.

The Biden administration is seeking the release of Gershkovich, who faces 20 years in prison. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said it would consider a prisoner swap — but only after a verdict in his trial, which has not yet begun.

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who was in court again Tuesday for his latest hearing, said the charges against Gershkovich “are fiction” and that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

Since invading Ukraine, Russian authorities have detained several U.S. nationals and other Westerners, seemingly bolstering that idea.

President Vladimir Putin has said he believed a deal can be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national in Germany who fits the description of Vadim Krasikov. He is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

U.S. officials made an offer to swap Gershkovich last year that was rejected by Russia, and the Biden administration has not made public any possible deals since then.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Gershkovich wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”

Fluent in Russian, Gershkovich knew the risks and, after his arrest, knew “right from the very start that this was going to take a long time,” Ebel said.

The Journal’s Tucker said she is “optimistic that 2024 will be the year Evan is freed but I’m also realistic,” noting that any negotiations for a swap are taking place against a “very febrile” backdrop.

That includes tensions with the West over the war in Ukraine, the recent attack on a Moscow concert hall and the U.S. presidential election.

Friends and family say Gershkovich is relying on his sense of humor to get through the days. Tracy said outside court Tuesday that he has displayed “remarkable resilience and strength in the face of this grim situation.”

From behind bars, he has organized presents for friends on their birthdays as well as sending flowers to important women in his life for International Women’s Day earlier this month.

“He is telling people not to freak out,” said Milman, noting that her son is a source of great pride for the family.

But as he enters his second year of detention, the strain on them is showing.

Every day, Milman said, “I wake up and look at the clock.”

“I think about if his lunchtime has passed, and his bedtime,” she said. “It’s very hard. It’s taking a toll.”

The Friday night massacre in Crocus City Hall, a sprawling shopping and entertainment venue on the northwestern outskirts of Moscow, was the deadliest extremist attack on Russian soil in nearly two decades. At least four gunmen toting automatic rifles shot at thousands of concertgoers and set the venue on fire.

An affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the violence, while U.S. intelligence said it had information confirming the group was responsible. French President Emmanuel Macron said France also has intelligence pointing to “an IS entity” as responsible for the attack.

The updated fatalities from Russia’s Emergencies Ministry didn’t state the number of wounded, but Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said earlier Wednesday that 80 people were in hospitals and another 205 had sought medical treatment from the attack.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, or the FSB, said it had arrested 11 people the day after the attack, including four suspected gunmen. The four men, identified as Tajik nationals, appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday on terrorism charges and showed signs of severe beatings. One appeared to be barely conscious during the hearing.

Russian officials, however, have insisted that Ukraine and the West had a role, claims that Kyiv vehemently denies. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of trying to drum up fervor as his forces fight in Ukraine.

news Mar 27

Russia claimed the West, Kyiv ordered the Moscow terror attack. Now it has the problem of proving it

Russia Mar 25

What is ISIS-K, the terror group linked to the Moscow concert hall bombing?

FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov has also alleged, without providing evidence, that Western spy agencies could have been involved. He repeated Putin’s claim that the four gunmen were trying to escape to Ukraine when they were arrested, casting it as proof of Kyiv’s alleged involvement.

But that assertion was undercut by Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who said Tuesday that the suspects were headed for Ukraine because they feared tight controls on the Belarus border.

The Islamic State group, which lost much of its territory following Russia’s military action in Syria after 2015, has long targeted Russia. In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian jetliner over the Sinai desert, killing all 224 people aboard, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.

The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It has recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

The United States warned Moscow two weeks before the massacre about a possible imminent attack. Three days before the tragedy, Putin denounced the U.S. Embassy’s notice on March 7 urging Americans to avoid crowds in Moscow, including concerts, calling it an attempt to frighten Russians and “blackmail” the Kremlin before the Russian presidential election.

Bortnikov said Russia was thankful for the warning but described it as very general.

Islamic extremist terrorism, which animated American foreign policy and defense strategy for a decade and a half after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has receded as a top-tier concern.

The attack that killed 133 people in a Moscow concert hall Friday is a reminder, however, that the terrorism threat still looms.

The group that claimed credit, an offshoot of ISIS called Islamic State in Khorasan, or ISIS-K, has eclipsed the once-fearsome core ISIS organization in Iraq and Syria as perhaps the most dangerous terrorist organization, U.S. officials and outside experts say.

“It’s becoming more of a regional actor,” said Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism specialist at Georgetown University. “It claimed responsibility for the attack in Iran in January, and now we have this devastating attack in Moscow.”

The Iran attack was a double suicide bombing that killed almost 100 people at a memorial for the Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani. U.S. officials say ISIS-K also was responsible for the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghan civilians.

Although U.S.-backed fighters five years ago drove the core ISIS from its so-called caliphate in Syria and declared victory, the remnants of the group remained. ISIS-K is believed to be active in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, and appears to have aspirations to attack Europe and the U.S., American officials say.

According to a July 2023 report to the United Nations Security Council, ISIS-K counts 4,000 to 6,000 members on the ground in Afghanistan, including fighters and their relatives.

To be sure, even if most of the U.S. public has largely stopped thinking about groups like ISIS, American defense officials have not. Gen. Michael Kurilla, who heads U.S. Central Command, told a House committee last week that ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”

He also warned that core ISIS members are languishing in Syrian detention camps.

“Over 9,000 detainees across 27 different detention facilities in Syria,” Kurilla said. “We need to repatriate those detainees to either face prosecution or reintegration, rehabilitation, back into their societies.”

The good news, from the American perspective, is that the U.S. appears to have significant intelligence insights into the plans and intentions of ISIS-K. U.S. officials warned both Iran and Russia that ISIS-K was poised to attack in those countries before the fact. Putin rejected the warning, but the the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a public statement warning Americans to stay away from concert halls.

“That’s pretty impressive,” Byman said. “It shows that U.S. counterterrorism capabilities remain an important factor. If they are trying to do something in Europe or the United States, there is at least a reasonable chance U.S. intelligence might be able to detect it.” 

Still, American officials worry that, while they may detect planning that involves a number of terrorists, they cannot guarantee they will discover a plot that involves sending one or two people into the U.S., or one that involves a lone extremist who is already in the country.

Islamic State in Khorasan was founded in 2015 by breakaway members of the Pakistani Taliban. It includes people of Afghan and Pakistani origin, as well as Central Asians. The group is now at war with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which puts it under pressure.

“I would say that ISIS-K poses a bit of a larger threat, but they are under attack from the Taliban regime right now,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told senators earlier this month. “And it’s a matter of time before they may have the ability and intent to actually attack the West at this point.”

A number of ISIS-K plots in Europe have been disrupted, Byman said, including with a wave of arrests of people from Central Asia in Germany and the Netherlands in July.

In January, Turkish officials say two masked members of ISIS-K attacked and killed a person at a Catholic Church in Istanbul. 

Russia, which invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, crushed a rebellion in Muslim-majority Chechnya in the 1990s and backed the Syrian government against ISIS in the 2010s, has long been a target of jihadis, experts say.

“By attacking Russian targets, ISIS-K in part seeks to deter further Russian involvement in the Middle East,” wrote terrorism experts Sara Harmouch and Amira Jadoon. “But also, such attacks provide high publicity for its cause and aim to inspire its supporters worldwide.”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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A court statement said two of the suspects accepted their guilt in the assault after being charged in the preliminary hearing, though the men’s condition raised questions about whether they were speaking freely. There had been earlier conflicting reports in Russian media outlets that said three or all four men admitted culpability.

Moscow’s Basmanny District Court formally charged Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32; Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, 30; Shamsidin Fariduni, 25; and Mukhammadsobir Faizov, 19, with committing a group terrorist attack resulting in the death of others. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The court ordered that the men, all of whom are citizens of Tajikistan, be held in pre-trial custody until May 22.

Russian media had reported that the men were tortured during interrogation by the security services, and Mirzoyev, Rachabalizoda and Fariduni showed signs of heavy bruising, including swollen faces,

Rachabalizoda also had a heavily bandaged ear. Russian media said Saturday that one of the suspects had his ear cut off during interrogation. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the report or the videos purporting to show this.

The fourth suspect, Faizov, was brought to court from a hospital in a wheelchair and sat with his eyes closed throughout the proceedings. He was attended by medics while in court, where he wore a hospital gown and trousers and was seen with multiple cuts.

Court officials said Mirzoyev and Rachabalizoda admitted guilt for the attack after being charged.

The hearing came as Russia observed a national day of mourning for the attack Friday on the suburban Crocus City Hall concert venue that killed at least 137 people.

The attack, which has been claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group, is the deadliest on Russian soil in years.

Russian authorities arrested the four suspected attackers Saturday, with seven more people detained on suspicion of involvement in the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an address to the nation Saturday night. He claimed they were captured while fleeing to Ukraine, something that Kyiv firmly denied.

Events at cultural institutions were canceled Sunday, flags were lowered to half staff and television entertainment and advertising were suspended, according to state news agency RIA Novosti. A steady stream of people added to a makeshift memorial near the burned-out concert hall, creating a huge mound of flowers.

“People came to a concert, some people came to relax with their families, and any one of us could have been in that situation. And I want to express my condolences to all the families that were affected here and I want to pay tribute to these people,” Andrey Kondakov, one of the mourners who came to lay flowers at the memorial, told AP.

“It is a tragedy that has affected our entire country,” kindergarten employee Marina Korshunova said. “It just doesn’t even make sense that small children were affected by this event.” Three children were among the dead.

Rescuers continued to search the damaged building and the death toll rose as more bodies were found as family and friends of some of those still missing waiting for news. Moscow’s Department of Health said Sunday it had begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, saying the process would take at least two weeks.

Igor Pogadaev was desperately seeking any details about his wife, Yana Pogadaeva, who went to the attack concert. The last he heard from her was when she sent him two photos from the Crocus City Hall music venue.

After Pogadaev saw the reports of gunmen opening fire on concertgoers, he rushed to the site, but couldn’t find her in the numerous ambulances or among the hundreds of people who had made their way out of the venue.

“I went around, searched, I asked everyone, I showed photographs. No one saw anything, no one could say anything,” Pogadaev told AP in a video message.

He watched flames bursting out of the building as he made frantic calls to a hotline for relatives of the victims, but received no information.

As the death toll mounted Saturday, Pogodaev scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the Moscow region, looking for information on newly admitted patients.

His wife wasn’t among the 182 reported injured, nor on the list of 60 victims authorities had already identified, he said.

The Moscow Region’s Emergency Situations Ministry posted a video Sunday showing equipment dismantling the damaged music venue to give rescuers access.

Putin has called the attack “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.

Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.

Putin didn’t mention IS in his speech to the nation, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s fight in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.

U.S. intelligence officials said they had confirmed the IS affiliate’s claim.

“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

The U.S. shared information with Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow, and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia, Watson said.

The raid was a major embarrassment for Putin and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.

Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.

IS, which fought against Russia during its intervention in the Syrian civil war, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, the IS Afghanistan affiliate said that it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.

The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq, saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of the Islamic State group’s ongoing war with countries that it says are fighting against Islam.

In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.

The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Events at cultural institutions were canceled, flags were lowered to half-staff and television entertainment and advertising were suspended, according to state news agency RIA Novosti. A steady stream of people added to a makeshift memorial near the burnt-out concert hall, creating a huge mound of flowers.

“People came to a concert, some people came to relax with their families, and any one of us could have been in that situation. And I want to express my condolences to all the families that were affected here and I want to pay tribute to these people,” Andrey Kondakov, one of the mourners who came to lay flowers at the memorial, told The Associated Press.

“It is a tragedy that has affected our entire country,” kindergarten employee Marina Korshunova said. “It just doesn’t even make sense that small children were affected by this event.” Three children were among the dead.

The attack, which has been claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group, is the deadliest on Russian soil in years.

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As rescuers continue to search the damaged building and the death toll rises as more bodies are found, some families still don’t know if relatives who went to the event targeted by gunmen on Friday are alive. Moscow’s Department of Health said Sunday it has begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, which will need at least two weeks.

Igor Pogadaev was desperately seeking any details of his wife’s whereabouts after she went to the concert and stopped responding to his messages.

He hasn’t seen a message from Yana Pogadaeva since she sent her husband two photos from the Crocus City Hall music venue.

After Pogadaev saw the reports of gunmen opening fire on concertgoers, he rushed to the site, but couldn’t find her in the numerous ambulances or among the hundreds of people who had made their way out of the venue.

“I went around, searched, I asked everyone, I showed photographs. No one saw anything, no one could say anything,” Pogadaev told the AP in a video message.

He watched flames bursting out of the building as he made frantic calls to a hotline for relatives of the victims, but received no information.

As the death toll mounted on Saturday, Pogodaev scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the Moscow region, looking for information on newly admitted patients.

But his wife wasn’t among the 154 reported injured, nor on the list of 50 victims authorities have already identified, he said.

Refusing to believe that his wife could be one of the 137 people who died in the attack, Pogadaev still hasn’t gone home.

“I couldn’t be alone anymore, it’s very difficult, so I drove to my friend’s,” he said. “Now at least I’ll be with someone.”

The Moscow Region’s Emergency Situations Ministry posted a video Sunday showing equipment dismantling the damaged music venue to give rescuers access.

Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin appears to be trying to tie Ukraine to the attack, something its government firmly denies.

Russian authorities arrested four suspected attackers on Saturday, Putin said in an nighttime address to the nation, among 11 people detained suspicion of involvement in the attack. He said that they were captured while fleeing to Ukraine.

Though no court hearing has been officially announced, there was a heavy police presence around Moscow’s Basmanny District Court on Sunday. Police tried to drive journalists away from the court.

Putin called the attack “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.

Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.

Kyiv strongly denied any involvement, and the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.

Putin didn’t mention IS in his speech to the nation, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s fight in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.

U.S. intelligence officials said they had confirmed the IS affiliate’s claim.

“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

The U.S. shared information with Russia in early March about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow, and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia, Watson said.

The raid was a major embarrassment for the Russian leader and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.

Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the U.S. condemned the attack and said that the Islamic State group is a “common terrorist enemy that must be defeated everywhere.”

IS, which fought against Russia during its intervention in the Syrian civil war, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, the IS Afghanistan affiliate said that it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.

The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq, saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of the Islamic State group’s ongoing war with countries that it says are fighting against Islam.

In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.

The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Russian authorities arrested the four men suspected of carrying out the attack on a suburban Moscow concert hall that killed at least 133 people, President Vladimir Putin said Saturday during an address to the nation. He claimed they were captured while fleeing to Ukraine.

Kyiv strongly denied any involvement in Friday’s attack on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, and the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.

Putin didn’t mention IS in his speech, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault in order to stoke fervor in Russia’s war in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.

A U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that U.S. agencies had confirmed that IS was responsible for the assault and that they had previously warned Moscow an attack could be imminent.

Putin said authorities have detained a total of 11 people in the attack, which also injured scores of concertgoers and left the venue a smoldering ruin. He called it “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspected gunmen as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.

Putin also said that additional security measures have been imposed throughout Russia, and he declared Sunday a day of mourning.

The attack, the deadliest in Russia in years, is a major embarrassment to the Russian leader and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.

Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.

The attack came two weeks after the U.S. embassy in Moscow issued a notice urging Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large Moscow gatherings, including concerts. The warning was repeated by several other Western embassies.

Investigators on Saturday were combing through the charred wreckage of the hall for more victims, and authorities said the death toll could still rise. Hundreds of people stood in line in Moscow early Saturday to donate blood and plasma, Russia’s health ministry said.

“We faced not just a thoroughly and cynically prepared terror attack, but a well-prepared and organized mass murder of peaceful innocent people,” Putin said.

His claim that the attackers tried to flee to Ukraine followed comments by Russian lawmakers who pointed the finger at Ukraine immediately after the attack. But Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied any involvement.

“Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods,” he posted on X. “Everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield.”

Ukraine’s foreign ministry accused Moscow of using the attack to try to stoke fervor for its war efforts.

“We consider such accusations to be a planned provocation by the Kremlin to further fuel anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Russian society, create conditions for increased mobilization of Russian citizens to participate in the criminal aggression against our country and discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the international community,” the ministry said in a statement.

Images shared by Russian state media Saturday showed emergency vehicles still gathered outside the ruins of Crocus City Hall, which could hold more than 6,000 people and has hosted many big events, including the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant that featured Donald Trump and others.

On Friday, crowds had gathered for a concert by the Russian rock band Picnic.

Videos posted online showed gunmen in the venue shooting civilians at point-blank range. Russian news reports cited authorities and witnesses as saying the attackers threw explosive devices that started the fire, which eventually consumed the building and caused its roof to collapse.

Dave Primov, who survived the attack, described the chaos to the AP as concertgoers rushed to leave the building: “People began to panic, started to run and collided with each other. Some fell down and others trampled on them.”

Messages of outrage, shock and support for the victims and their families have streamed in from around the world.

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council condemned “the heinous and cowardly terrorist attack” and underlined the need for the perpetrators to be held accountable. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also condemned the terrorist attack “in the strongest possible terms,” his spokesman said.

IS, which lost much of its ground after Russia’s military action in Syria, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, IS’s Afghanistan affiliate said it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.

In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacation-goers returning from Egypt.

The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

On March 7, just hours before the U.S. embassy warned about imminent attacks, Russia’s top security agency said it had thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Moscow by an IS cell, killing several of its members in the Kaluga region near the Russian capital. A few days before that, Russian authorities said six alleged IS members were killed in a shootout in Ingushetia, in Russia’s Caucasus region.

A U.S. intelligence official told the AP that American intelligence agencies had gathered information in recent weeks that the IS branch was planning an attack in Moscow, and that U.S. officials had privately shared the intelligence earlier this month with Russian officials.

Another U.S. official said the IS branch in Afghanistan had long targeted Russia and reiterated that no Ukrainians were involved in the attack.

Both officials were briefed on the matter but weren’t authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence information and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Just three days before the attack, Putin had publicly denounced the Western warnings of a potential terrorist attack as an attempt to intimidate Russians. “All that resembles open blackmail and an attempt to frighten and destabilize our society,” he said at a meeting with top security officials.

Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Colleen Long in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.

Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on Friday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing over 90 people, injuring more than 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack just days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on power in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on affiliated channels on social media. A U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies had learned the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in Moscow and shared the information with Russian officials.

Russia’s Investigative Committee four people believed to be directly involved in the attack were detained on Saturday. They were stopped in the Bryansk region of western Russia, “not far from the border with Ukraine,” it said.

It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the attackers after the raid, which state investigators were investigating as terrorism.

The attack, which left the concert hall in flames with a collapsing roof, was the deadliest in Russia in years and came as the country’s war in Ukraine dragged into a third year. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the raid a “huge tragedy.”

The Kremlin said Putin was informed minutes after the assailants burst into Crocus City Hall, a large music venue on Moscow’s western edge that can accommodate 6,200 people.

The attack took place as crowds gathered for a performance by the Russian rock band Picnic. The Investigative Committee, the top state criminal investigation agency, reported early Saturday that 93 people were killed. Health authorities released a list of 145 injured — 115 of them hospitalized, including five children.

Some Russian news reports suggested more victims could have been trapped by the blaze that erupted after the assailants threw explosives.

Video showed the building on fire, with a huge cloud of smoke rising through the night sky. The street was lit up by the blinking blue lights of dozens of firetrucks, ambulances and other emergency vehicles, as fire helicopters buzzed overhead to dump water on the blaze that took hours to contain.

The prosecutor’s office said several men in combat fatigues entered the concert hall and fired on concertgoers.

Dave Primov, who was in the hall during the attack, described panic and chaos when the attack began.

“There were volleys of gunfire,” Primov told the AP. “We all got up and tried to move toward the aisles. People began to panic, started to run and collided with each other. Some fell down and others trampled on them.”

Videos posted by Russian media and on messaging app channels showed men toting assault rifles shooting screaming people at point-blank range. One video showed a man in the auditorium saying the assailants had set it on fire, as gunshots rang out incessantly.

Guards at the concert hall didn’t have guns, and some could have been killed at the start of the attack, Russian media reported. Some Russian news outlets suggested the assailants fled before special forces and riot police arrived. Reports said police patrols were looking for several vehicles the attackers could have used to escape.

In a statement posted by its Aamaq news agency, the Islamic State group said it attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk on Moscow’s outskirts, killing and wounding hundreds. It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the claim.

However, U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the claim by the Islamic State group’s branch based in Afghanistan that it was responsible for the Moscow attack, a U.S. official told the AP.

The official said U.S. intelligence agencies had gathered information in recent weeks that the IS branch was planning an attack in Moscow. He said U.S. officials privately shared the intelligence earlier this month with Russian officials. The official was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence information and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Noting that the IS statement cast its claim as an attack targeting Christians, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert on the terrorist group, said it appeared to reflect the group’s strategy of “striking wherever they can as part of a global ‘fight the infidels and apostates everywhere.’”

In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacation-goers returning from Egypt. The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in the past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of former Soviet Union.

On March 7, Russia’s top security agency said it thwarted an attack on a synagogue in Moscow by an Islamic State cell, killing several of its members in the Kaluga region near the Russian capital. A few days earlier, Russian authorities said six alleged IS members were killed in a shootout in Ingushetia in Russia’s volatile Caucasus region.

On Friday, statements of outrage, shock and support for those affected by the concert call attack streamed in from around the world.

Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who relentlessly surveil and pressure Kremlin critics, failed to identify the threat and prevent the attack.

Russian officials said security was tightened at Moscow’s airports, railway stations and the capital’s sprawling subway system. Moscow’s mayor canceled all mass gatherings, and theaters and museums shut for the weekend. Other Russian regions also tightened security.

The Kremlin didn’t immediately blame anyone for the attack, but some Russian lawmakers were quick to accuse Ukraine and called for ramping up strikes. Hours before the attack, the Russian military l aunched a sweeping barrage on Ukraine’s power system, crippling the country’s biggest hydroelectric plant and other energy facilities and leaving more than a million people without electricity.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, said that if Ukraine involvement was proven, all those involved “must be tracked down and killed without mercy, including officials of the state that committed such outrage.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukraine involvement.

“Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods,” he posted on X. “Everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield.”

John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said he couldn’t yet speak about the details but “the images are just horrible. And just hard to watch.”

Friday’s attack followed a statement earlier this month by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that urged Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large gatherings in the Russian capital, including concerts. The warning was repeated by several other Western embassies.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said Friday the U.S. government had information about a planned attack in Moscow, prompting the State Department advisory to Americans. The U.S. government shared the information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding “duty to warn” policy, Watson said.

Putin, who extended his grip on Russia for another six years in this week’s presidential vote after a sweeping crackdown on dissent, denounced the Western warnings as an attempt to intimidate Russians. “All that resembles open blackmail and an attempt to frighten and destabilize our society,” he said earlier this week.

Russia was shaken by a series of deadly terror attacks in the early 2000s during the fighting with separatists in the Russian province of Chechnya.

In October 2002, Chechen militants took about 800 people hostage at a Moscow theater. Two days later, Russian special forces stormed the building and 129 hostages and 41 Chechen fighters died, most from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces use to subdue the attackers.

In September 2004, about 30 Chechen militants seized a school in Beslan in southern Russia taking hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later and more than 330 people, about half of them children, were killed.

Putin’s comments came after NBC News asked: “Mr. President, journalist Evan Gershkovich spent this election in prison; Boris Nadezhdin, who opposes your war in Ukraine, was not allowed to stand against you; and Alexei Navalny died in one of your prisons during your campaign. Mr. President, is this what you’d call democracy?”

Putin, who rarely speaks Navalny’s name, said in response that “several days before Mr. Navalny perished, I was told by some of my colleagues … that there is an idea to exchange Mr. Navalny for some people in prison in Western countries.”

“Believe me or not, the person talking to me hardly finished their sentence when I said: ‘I agree.’ But unfortunately, the thing that happened happened,” Putin added, speaking as he declared victory in the country’s elections.

Putin’s remarks came on the last day of a national election in which he was leading with 88% of the vote. His expected win, following a relentless crackdown on dissent, will extend his nearly quarter-century of rule for six more years. 

Navalny’s supporters have alleged that Putin had him killed to thwart an imminent prisoner swap that would have freed him and two Americans. Five sources told NBC News that such a deal was being negotiated but that it was not imminent when Navalny died Feb. 16 at age 47.

Putin said the swap would have had one condition — that Navalny never return to Russia.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who is in Berlin, was offered the chance to come to Russia and see her husband, but she chose to stay abroad, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, later told NBC News.

Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner who led opposition to Putin for more than a decade, spent his last days in a Russian penal colony above the Arctic Circle. Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said he died after having returned from a walk and saying he felt unwell.

In 2020, Navalny almost died after he was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent while on a trip in Russia. He was taken to Germany for treatment and was arrested after he returned to Russia — spending his final years behind bars following a conviction on extremism-related charges.

His death has been widely blamed on the Kremlin. In a fiery speech at the White House the day Navalny died, President Joe Biden said he had “no doubt” Navalny’s death “was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

The next week, Biden announced more than 500 sanctions he said were designed to hold Russia accountable for Navalny’s death and for the country’s war with Ukraine. The sanctions target people connected to Navalny’s imprisonment, as well as Russia’s financial and defense sectors, Biden said.

“They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home,” he said on Feb. 23.

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Navalny was buried at a cemetery in the snowy southeastern outskirts of the capital after a short Russian Orthodox ceremony, with vast crowds waiting outside the church and then streaming to the fresh grave of President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic with flowers and anti-government chants.

Although riot police set up barricades at both the church and cemetery, no detentions were reported.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia, who was not seen at the funeral, thanked him for “26 years of absolute happiness.”

“I don’t know how to live without you, but I will try to do it in a way that you up there are proud of me and happy for me,” she wrote on Instagram.

The service followed a battle with authorities over the release of his body. His team said several Moscow churches refused to hold the funeral for the man who crusaded against official corruption and organized massive protests. Many Western leaders blamed the death on the Russian leader, an accusation the Kremlin angrily rejected.

Navalny’s team eventually got permission from the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, which was encircled by crowd-control barriers on Friday. Hours before the funeral started, hundreds waited to enter under the watch of police.

As his coffin was removed from the hearse and taken inside the church, the crowd waiting outside broke into respectful applause and then chanted: “Navalny! Navalny!” Some also shouted, “You weren’t afraid, neither are we!” and later “No to war!” “Russia without Putin!” and “Russia will be free!”

Western diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, were among those who attended, along with presidential hopefuls Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova. Both wanted to run against Putin in the upcoming presidential elections and opposed his war in Ukraine; neither was allowed on the ballot.

Images from inside the church showed an open casket with Navalny’s body covered with red and white flowers, and his parents, Lyudmila and Anatoly, sitting beside it.

Navalny’s closest associates live outside Russia and made comments in a livestream of the funeral on his YouTube channel, their voices occasionally cracking with emotion.

“Those people who follow what is happening, it is of course obvious to them that this man is a hero of our country, whom we will not forget,” said Nadezhda Ivanova of Kaliningrad, who was outside the church with other supporters. “What was done to him is incredibly difficult to accept and get through it.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged those gathering in Moscow and other places not to break the law, saying any “unauthorized (mass) gatherings” are violations.

After the short church service, thousands marched to the nearby Borisovskoye Cemetery, where the police were also out in force.

With the casket open, Navalny’s mother and father stroked and kissed his head. A large crowd gathered at the cemetery’s gates, chanting: “Let us in to say goodbye!”

The coffin was then lowered into the ground. In keeping with his irreverent sense of humor, music from the “The Terminator 2″ was played, a movie his allies said he considered “the best in the world.”

Mourners streamed by his open grave, tossing handfuls of soil onto the coffin as a large crowd waited at the cemetery’s entrance. As dusk fell, workers shoveled dirt into the grave while Lyudmila Navalnaya watched. A mound of flowers, funeral wreaths, candles and a portrait of Navalny sat nearby.

Lyudmila Navalnaya spent eight days trying to get authorities to release the body following his Feb. 16 death at Penal Colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

Even on Friday itself, the morgue where the body was being held delayed its release, according to Ivan Zhdanov, Navalny’s close ally and director of his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Authorities originally said they couldn’t turn over the body because they needed to conduct post-mortem tests. Navalnaya made a video appeal to Putin to release it so she could bury her son with dignity.

At least one funeral director said he had been “forbidden” to work with Navalny’s supporters, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on social media. They also struggled to find a hearse.

“Unknown people are calling up people and threatening them not to take Alexei’s body anywhere,” Yarmysh said Thursday.

Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.

His Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his regional offices were designated as “extremist organizations” by the Russian government in 2021.

His widow accused Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of trying to block a public funeral.

“We don’t want any special treatment — just to give people the opportunity to say farewell to Alexei in a normal way,” Yulia Navalnaya wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a speech to European lawmakers on Wednesday, she also expressed fears that police might interfere with the gathering or would “arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband.”

Moscow authorities refused permission for a separate memorial event for Navalny and slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday, citing COVID-19 restrictions, according to politician Yekaterina Duntsova said. Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former deputy prime minister, was shot to death as he walked on a bridge adjacent to the Kremlin on the night of Feb. 27, 2015.

Yarmysh also urged Navalny’s supporters around the world to lay flowers in his honor Friday.

“Everyone who knew Alexei says what a cheerful, courageous and honest person he was,” Yarmysh said Thursday. “But the greater truth is that even if you never met Alexei, you knew what he was like, too. You shared his investigations, you went to rallies with him, you read his posts from prison. His example showed many people what to do when even when things were scary and difficult.”

A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4, the report said, quoting court officials.

Lyudmila Navalnaya has been trying to retrieve her son’s body since Saturday, following his death in a penal colony in Russia’s far north a day earlier. She has been unable to find out where his body is being held, Navalny’s team reported.

Navalnaya appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday to release her son’s remains so that she could bury him with dignity.

“For the fifth day, I have been unable to see him. They wouldn’t release his body to me. And they’re not even telling me where he is,” a black-clad Navalnaya, 69, said in the video, with the barbed wire of Penal Colony No. 3in Kharp, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

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“I’m reaching out to you, Vladimir Putin. The resolution of this matter depends solely on you. Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body is released immediately, so that I can bury him like a human being,” she said in the video, which was posted to social media by Navalny’s team.

Russian authorities have said the cause of Navalny’s death is still unknown and refused to release his body for the next two weeks as the preliminary inquest continues, members of Navalny’s team said.

They accused the government of stalling to try to hide evidence. On Monday, Navalny’s widow, Yulia, released a video accusing Putin of killing her husband and alleged the refusal to release his body was part of a cover-up.

“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably,” she said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations of a cover-up, telling reporters that “these are absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”

Navalny’s death has deprived the Russian opposition of its best-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that is all but certain to give Putin another six years in power. Many Russians had seen Navalny as a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition.

Since Navalny’s death, about 400 people have been detained across in Russia as they tried to pay tribute to him with flowers and candles, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests. Authorities cordoned off some of the memorials to victims of Soviet repression across the country that were being used as sites to leave makeshift tributes to Navalny. Police removed the flowers at night, but more keep appearing.

Peskov said police were acting “in accordance with the law” by detaining people paying tribute to Navalny.

Over 60,000 people have submitted requests to the government asking for Navalny’s remains to be handed over to his relatives, OVD-Info said.

The 33-year-old woman with dual Russian-American citizenship was detained for her involvement in “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against the security of our country,” the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg said early Tuesday.

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In a statement posted Tuesday about the detention, the woman was not identified. Loved ones in Southern California identified her as 33-year-old Ksenia Karelina. A senior U.S. official confirmed her identity to NBC News, describing Karelina as a Russian-American ballerina.

That money was spent on medicine, equipment, weapons and ammunition, the statement said. No other details nor a description of any evidence were released.

“Since February 2022, she has proactively collected funds in the interests of one of the Ukrainian organizations,” the statement said.

She also is accused by Russian authorities of “public actions in support” of Kyiv while in the United States.

Karelina is accused of treason under article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code, which is punishable by 12 to 20 years in prison and confiscation of property, NBC News reported. She was detained under a pre-trial custody order.

Video released by FSB showed a person in a coat and stocking hat, partially covering her face, being handcuffed and led to a vehicle by a person wearing a camouflage jacket.

Karelina works as an esthetician at Ciel Spa in the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. In a social media post, co-workers said Karelina went to Russia to visit her 90-year-old grandmother, parents and younger sister.

A White House official told NBC News, “The White House and State Department are working to obtain more information and secure consular access to the individual.”

There was no immediate comment from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow or the State Department.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began two years ago this week.

The Kremlin on Monday confirmed an investigation into the death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is ongoing and insisted that “all due actions are being taken” to determine the circumstances surrounding his demise.

Navalny, 47, was a well-known figure in Russia and a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He died in an Arctic penal colony, where had been serving a 19-year prison term.

World leaders reacted with dismay and suspicion to the news, while Navalny’s allies say the anti-corruption campaigner was likely murdered on Putin’s orders. The Kremlin has rejected these allegations, with the Russian foreign ministry calling the reaction from political leaders “self-exposing,” given that no forensic medical examination has yet been made available.

“The investigation is being carried out, all due actions are being taken. But no results of this investigation have been published so far, they are not known yet,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday at a daily news briefing, according to a NBC News translation.

“When there is no information, we consider it totally unacceptable to make such statements, which are quite rude and gross, to say frankly,” he added, referring to comments from political leaders blaming Putin for Navalny’s death.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Friday that “Putin is responsible” for Navalny’s death. “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death … What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality.”

Asked whether the Kremlin was interested in a proper probe into Navanly’s death, Peskov replied, “Actions provided for by Russia’s legislation are being taken.”

‘Literally pushed out’

Earlier on Monday, Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said that Navalny’s mother and lawyers had been blocked from entering a mortuary where his body could be being kept.

Yarmysh said on social media platform X that one of Navalny’s lawyers was “literally pushed out” and staff refused to answer questions about the whereabouts of his body.

CNBC could not independently verify the report. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in blocking the return of Navalny’s body to his relatives.

“This is not a question for us, we are not involved in this matter. This is not a function of the President’s Administration,” Peskov said.

Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, on Monday said that she believed her husband was killed by Putin. In a video statement published on Navalny’s YouTube channel, Navalnaya vowed to continue his work and called on others to join her.

Navalny, who had been held behind bars in Russia since 2021, produced numerous reports on the corruption that had flourished during Putin’s leadership.

Famously, Putin has a long-running tradition of refusing to mention Navalny by name in public — a decision the Kremlin has previously said stems from the president’s views of the critic.

Navalny had sought to challenge Putin for Russia’s presidency, but his candidacy was barred in 2018. Putin will run for president once again next month, in an election where he faces only token opposition.

The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms.

The news reverberated across the globe, with many world leaders blaming the death on President Vladimir Putin and his government. In an exchange with reporters shortly after leaving a Saturday church service, President Joe Biden reiterated his stance that Putin was ultimately to blame for Navalny’s death. “The fact of the matter is, Putin is responsible. Whether he ordered it, he’s responsible for the circumstance,” Biden said. “It’s a reflection of who he is. It cannot be tolerated.”

Meanwhile, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, published a picture of the couple on Instagram Sunday in her first social media post since her husband’s death. The caption read simply: “I love you.” Hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay a tribute to the politician. In over a dozen cities, police detained 401 people by Saturday night, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.

More than 200 arrests were made in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, the group said. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and was arrested on Saturday morning outside his home. He was charged with organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell in a police precinct, but was later hospitalised with a stroke, OVD-Info reported.

Courts in St. Petersburg have ordered 42 of those detained on Friday to serve from one to six days in jail, while nine others were fined, court officials said late on Saturday. In Moscow, at least six people were ordered to serve 15 days in jail, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two more in the city of Bryansk, the group said.

US & World

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Navalny death is a pre-election gambit from Putin, anti-Kremlin activist Bill Browder says

news Feb 17

Jailed Putin foe Alexei Navalny confirmed dead with family calling for body to be returned

Russia Feb 17

Tributes to Alexei Navalny, Putin's greatest foe, removed from Russian cities as police look on

The news of Navalny’s death came a month before a presidential election in Russia that is widely expected to give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.

Questions about the cause of death lingered, and it remained unclear when the authorities would release Navalny’s body. More than 12,000 people have submitted requests to the Russian government asking for the politician’s remains to be handed over to his relatives, OVD-Info said Sunday.

Navalny’s team said Saturday that the politician was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately stalling the release of the body, with Navalny’s mother and lawyers getting contradicting information from various institutions where they went in their quest to retrieve the body. “They’re driving us around in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Saturday.

“Everything there is covered with cameras in the colony. Every step he took was filmed from all angles all these years. Each employee has a video recorder. In two days, there has been not a single video leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said Sunday.

A note handed to Navalny’s mother stated that he died at 2:17 p.m. Friday, according to Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and became unconscious at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived, the service said, adding that the cause of death is still “being established.”

Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He has received three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges he has rejected as politically motivated.

After the last verdict that handed him a 19-year term, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”

Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference.

She said she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”

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More than 100 people were detained in eight cities across Russia after they came to lay flowers in memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia. Russia’s prison service said in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. On Saturday, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people, OVD-Info said.

Videos and photos shared on Russian social media channels showed flowers being cleared from monuments to victims of Soviet-era repressions across Russia. In Moscow, flowers were removed overnight from a memorial near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service by a large group while police looked on, a video showed. But by morning more flowers had appeared.

The news of Navalny’s death comes less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power.

It shows “that the sentence in Russia now for opposition is not merely imprisonment, but death,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia & Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and lost consciousness at the penal colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived, but he couldn’t be revived; the cause of death is still “being established,” it said.

Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism.

After the last verdict, Navalny said he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”

Hours after Navalny’s death was reported, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a dramatic appearance at a security conference in Germany where many leaders had gathered.

She said she had considered canceling, “but then I thought what Alexei would do in my place. And I’m sure he would be here,” adding that she was unsure if she could believe the news from official Russian sources.

“But if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin’s friends, his government to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband. And this day will come very soon,” Navalnaya said.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”

Navalny “could have lived safely in exile,” but returned home despite knowing he could be imprisoned or killed “because he believed so deeply in his country, in Russia.”

In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Navalny “has probably now paid for this courage with his life.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin was told of Navalny’s death. The opposition leader’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the team had no confirmation yet.

He was 47.

Navalny was poisoned with a military nerve agent while on a business trip in Russia in 2020 — an attempt on his life that he blamed directly on Putin — and spent his final years behind bars as the Russian leader reshaped the country to rally behind his war in Ukraine.

News of his death, which comes as the Kremlin is preparing to orchestrate another election victory for Putin in March, drew outrage from the West, where many leaders blamed Putin. President Joe Biden said he was “both not surprised and outraged.”

The Kremlin responded, decrying what it said were “absolutely rabid statements.”

Navalny was serving a combined 30 ½-year jail sentence when he died. He went missing in Russia’s penal system in December, eventually turning up at a high-security penal colony in a remote town above the Arctic Circle.

Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement that Navalny had died after feeling unwell following a walk Friday.

“On February 16, 2024, in penal colony No. 3, convict A.A. Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” the prison service for the Yamalo-Nenets region, where Navalny was moved, said in a statement on its website.

“The facility’s medical workers immediately arrived at the scene and an emergency medical team was called in. All necessary resuscitation measures have been carried out, but they did not yield positive results. Emergency medics confirmed the death of the convict,” the statement added.

There was no immediate information about what exactly caused Navalny’s death, with the region’s investigative committee saying it has launched a “procedural investigation.”

Navalny’s wife, Yulia, received a standing ovation at the Munich Security Conference, where Western officials gathered Friday.

“I don’t know whether I should believe the news,” she said, explaining it had come from state sources she said were known for lying.

If it’s true, she said, she wants Putin and his allies “to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family and with my husband. They will be brought to justice, and this day will come soon.”

Navalny’s allies have long raised concerns about his health and poor conditions in jail, where they said he had to spend many days in crammed “punishment cells” for the most minor of conduct violations.

But he appeared healthy as he addressed a court via video link from the penal colony Thursday, laughing and cracking jokes.

Navalny’s mother said that her son had also been “healthy and happy” when she last saw him on Monday, according to Russian media.

“I don’t want to hear any condolences. We saw him in prison on the 12, in a meeting. He was alive, healthy and happy,” Lyudmila Navalnaya wrote in a Facebook post on Friday according to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

A spokesperson for the opposition leader said on X that they did not have any confirmation of his death and that Navalny’s lawyer was traveling to the town where he was held. “Russian authorities publish a confession that they killed Alexey Navalny in prison,” Leonid Volkov, a close ally of many years, said in a post on X.

Reaction to Navalny’s death was also swift in the West.

The news “only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Munich, where he met with Navalny’s wife to express his condolences.

Biden, addressing the nation later from The White House, paid tribute to Navalny’s work as a “powerful voice” for truth.

“Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden said. He said the U.S. did not know exactly what happened but that “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said “Russia has serious questions to answer,” while European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on X that Navalny’s death was a “grim reminder of what Putin and his regime are all about.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was also in Munich, said it was “obvious” that Putin was directly behind Navalny’s death. “He doesn’t care who dies to keep his position,” Zelenskyy added. “Putin must lose everything and answer for what he has done.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin was informed of Navalny’s death. He later criticized the response from Western leaders.

“There is no information from medics. There is no information from forensic experts, no information from the Federal Prison Service. And then [we see] such statements,” Peskov said. “These are absolutely rabid statements. We consider such statements absolutely unacceptable.”

A thorn in the Kremlin’s side

Navalny’s death leaves Russia’s opposition, wounded by years of harassment and prosecution, without a clear leader. All of Putin’s most high-profile critics are now either dead, jailed or in exile. 

Navalny was, undoubtedly, the biggest thorn in the Kremlin’s side. 

For more than a decade, he led nationwide protests against the authorities, ran for office to challenge members of the Russian establishment and set up a network of campaign offices across the country that have since been dismantled.

Born in 1976 in the tiny town of Bytyn, near Moscow, Navalny was educated as a lawyer and economist, but entered politics in 2008, starting his anti-corruption fund, FBK,  three years later. 

He was known for his oratory skills, as well as his use of the online space to promote the results of his investigations and spread his ideal of what he called the “wonderful Russia of tomorrow.” His digital savvy made him particularly popular among Russia’s more democratically minded teenagers and youth. 

Navalny rose to prominence as Russia’s most outspoken Kremlin critic after leading a series of anti-corruption investigations into members of the Russian elite. 

His 2017 exposure of the lavish lifestyle of Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister, led to mass protests. And an investigation into a luxurious “secret palace” on Russia’s Black Sea coast, purportedly owned by Putin, resulted in a wave of indignation across Russia in 2021. 

Navalny tried to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, but was barred from entering the race because of a 2014 embezzlement conviction, which he categorically denied as fabricated to keep him out of politics. Russian officials made a point of not referring to Navalny by name to avoid raising his profile in public. 

While on a business trip in Russia in August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the military nerve agent in an attempt on his life that he blamed directly on Putin.

Navalny survived his 2020 poisoning, thanks to the insistence of his family that he be airlifted to Germany, where he underwent treatment and a long rehabilitation process. 

The Kremlin denied any involvement in his poisoning, which was condemned by Western governments and led to a further straining of relations with Russia.

Navalny nonetheless decided to return to Russia in early 2021 and was arrested upon landing on charges stemming from the 2014 embezzlement case. He was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison for a parole violation linked to that conviction. The decision came days after more than 5,000 people were detained across Russia in rallies supporting Navalny.

His allies have also been persecuted, and his anti-corruption fund was declared an extremist organization a few months after his sentencing, forcing it to shut down and most of the top staff to flee abroad. 

He was tried on new charges of fraud and contempt of court and was sentenced to nine more years in jail. Then in August, he was sentenced to a further 19 years in a maximum security penal colony on charges of extremism, in what his allies and the international community called a Kremlin campaign to keep him incarcerated forever. Navalny has denied all charges against him as politically motivated.

His supporters have raised concerns about his treatment in custody and detention conditions, including access to proper medical care and frequent isolation in a tiny punishment cell.

In an interview with NBC News in 2021, Putin said he could not guarantee that Navalny would get out of prison alive.

But even in jail, Navalny continued to challenge Putin.

In his signature defiant but sarcastic style, Navalny detailed the realities of the Russian penitentiary system and promoted new anti-corruption investigations his team had been working on in exile. He issued anti-Kremlin statements through his lawyers and spoke openly against the Russian government’s actions in Ukraine.

He was designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 2021, with the U.S. and other governments calling for his release. 

A film about his life won an Oscar for best documentary feature last year. 

But the win caused controversy in Ukraine, where some critics painted Navalny as a Russian nationalist and pointed to comments in 2014 in which he said he sees no difference between Ukrainians and Russians — a sentiment Putin used as one of the arguments behind his war eight years later. Navalny, however, criticized the Russian-backed insurgency in east Ukraine and later described the full-scale invasion as both unjust and self-defeating. 

Navalny leaves behind his wife, Yulia, daughter Daria and son Zahar.

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White House national security spokesman John Kirby said U.S. intelligence officials have information that Russia has obtained the capability but that such a weapon is not currently operational. U.S. officials are analyzing the information they have on the emerging technology and have consulted with allies and partners on the matter.

“First this is not an active capability that’s been deployed and though Russia’s pursuit of this particular capability is troubling, there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety,” Kirby said. “We’re not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth.’’

The White House confirmed its intelligence after a vague warning Wednesday from the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee, Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, urged the Biden administration to declassify information about what he called a serious national security threat.

Kirby said that the process of reviewing and declassifying aspects of the Russian capability was underway when Turner “regrettably” released his statement.

“We have been very careful and deliberate about what we decide to declassify downgrade and share with the public,” he added.

Russia has downplayed the U.S. concern about the capability.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described the claims about a new Russian military capability as a ruse intended to make the U.S. Congress support aid for Ukraine.

“It’s obvious that Washington is trying to force Congress to vote on the aid bill by hook or by crook,” Peskov said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. “Let’s see what ruse the White House will use.”

Kirby said the capability is space based and would violate the international Outer Space Treaty, which more than 130 countries have signed onto, including Russia. He declined to comment on whether the weapon is nuclear capable. The treaty prohibits the deployment of “nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” in orbit or “station weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

The White House said it would look to engage the Russians directly on the concerns. Even as the White House sought to assure Americans, Kirby acknowledged it was a serious matter.

“I don’t want to minimize the potential here for disruption,” Kirby said.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan briefed lawmakers Thursday on Capitol Hill on the Russian threat.

After the meeting, Turner said Sullivan spoke to lawmakers about the administration’s options in addressing the threat.

“I think the bottom line is that we all came away with a very strong impression that the administration is taking this very seriously and that the administration has a plan in place,” Turner said. “We look forward to supporting them as they go to implement it.”

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the threat “pretty standard stuff” in terms of the national security threats that the intelligence panel deals with.

“This is not a threat for today, tomorrow, next week or next month,” Himes said.

Himes said he respected Turner’s decision to warn Congress at large about the threat but had expressed concern in advance about taking it public on social media. “And my concern was specific that if we did that, we would be staring into a whole lot of cameras and microphones,” Himes told the reporters and camera crews outside the secure briefing room. “And here we are.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who also attended Thursday’s briefing with Sullivan, said that lawmakers raised concerns about the threat with the Biden administration last month and requested a meeting with Biden to discuss it. He called Thursday’s meeting “informative” and said Sullivan had assured leaders the White House will remain in close contact with lawmakers about the matter.

“It’s not a matter that can involve delay,” Johnson said. “It’s something we have to address seriously and on an immediate basis, and we are.”

The White House did not hide its frustration with how Turner went about sharing concerns about the threat.

“We make decisions about how and when to publicly disclose intelligence in a careful deliberate and strategic way, in a way that we choose,” Kirby said.

“We’re not going to be knocked off that process, regardless of what, in this particular case has found its way into the public domain,” he added. “I can assure you that we will continue to keep members of Congress as well as our international partners and all of you and the American people as fully informed as possible.”

White House officials said the U.S. intelligence community has concerns about a broad declassification of the intelligence. The U.S. has been aware of Russia’s pursuit of anti-satellite capability going back at least months, if not a few years. Biden has been regularly briefed by his national security team on the issue, including on Thursday.

The U.S. has frequently downgraded and unveiled intelligence findings about Moscow’s plans and operations over the course of its nearly two-year war with Ukraine.

Such efforts have been focused on highlighting plans for Russian misinformation operations or to throw attention on Moscow’s difficulties in prosecuting its war against Ukraine as well as its coordination with Iran and North Korea to supply it with badly needed weaponry.

Intelligence officials assessed that starting with private engagement on the Russian anti-satellite threat could have been a more effective approach, Kirby said.

“We agree with that, which is consistent, of course, with the manner in which we have conducted downgrades of information in the past,” Kirby said. “This administration has put a lot of focus on doing that in a strategic way, a deliberate way. And in particular, when it comes to Russia.”

AP writer Darlene Superville contributed reporting.

The verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport means the Russians are set to be stripped of the Olympic title and never get the gold medals that are yet to be awarded in the unprecedented case. The American skaters never got their silver medals and are set to be named Olympic champions instead.

The International Olympic Committee decided not to present any medals for the event in Beijing, where the 15-year-old Valieva was the star performer hours before her positive test for a banned heart medicine was revealed.

The case provoked legal chaos at the Beijing Olympics because Valieva’s sample, taken six weeks earlier at the Russian championships, was not notified as a positive test until Feb. 7, 2022, by a laboratory in Sweden which had staffing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CAS said a panel of three judges upheld appeals led by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which asked the court to disqualify Valieva from the Olympics and ban her. A Russian sports tribunal had cleared her of any blame, citing that she was a minor.

The court banned her for four years, until Dec. 25, 2025 — about seven weeks before the next Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

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The IOC, which did not immediately comment on Monday, is responsible for reallocating medals and its executive board is next scheduled to meet in March. The Russians won decisively in the team event though will drop in the standings without Valieva’s points. Behind the U.S., Japan took bronze and Canada placed fourth.

“We now anticipate the day when we can wholeheartedly celebrate these athletes, along with their peers from around the world,” the U.S. Olympic body’s CEO, Sarah Hirshland, said in a statement Monday.

The likely new Olympic champions are Evan Bates, Karen Chen, Nathan Chen, Madison Chock, Zachary Donohue, Brandon Frazier, Madison Hubbell, Alexa Knierim and Vincent Zhou.

The International Skating Union said it welcomed the ruling and would comment Tuesday on the consequences. Those include amending results of the two Olympic competitions Valieva took part in.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the ruling: “Of course, we don’t agree with this. From my point of view, of course, it’s a politicized.”

Valieva’s legal team said it was reviewing the CAS decision before deciding whether to appeal to the Swiss supreme court, lawyer Andrea Pinna said in a statement. Pinna, who is based in Paris, led the skater’s defense at the appeal hearings in September and November.

Appeals to the Swiss supreme court can be made on narrow procedural grounds, not the merits of the case.

Valieva’s lawyers had argued she was contaminated by traces of the trimetazidine medication they said her grandfather used.

“Having carefully considered all the evidence put before it,” the court said in a statement, “the CAS panel concluded that Ms. Valieva was not able to establish, on the balance of probabilities and on the basis of the evidence before the Panel, that she had not committed the (doping violation) intentionally.”

The judges decided that, according to Russian anti-doping rules, Valieva could not benefit from having been a minor at the time of the positive test.

There was “no basis under the rules to treat them any differently from an adult athlete,” said the court, which did not publish its detailed verdict pending a review of confidentiality issues.

Valieva was able to continue to skate at the Olympics after rulings by a Russian tribunal and a separate CAS panel in Beijing did not hold her responsible because she was a minor.

The intense scrutiny on Valieva led to an error-filled skate in the individual event, where she was favored for gold but dropped to fourth place.

The drama continued when she left the ice. The reaction of her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, was fiercely criticized by skating experts and International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach.

Bach said in Beijing one day later he had been “very, very disturbed” to watch the “tremendous coldness” of Valieva’s entourage.

At that news conference, Bach gave an untypically direct reply apportioning blame when a Russian journalist seemed to suggest Olympic authorities and global media were bullying a 15-year-old.

“The ones who have administered this drug in her body, these are the ones who are guilty,” the IOC president said in Beijing.

World anti-doping rules require investigations of an entourage when an athlete 16 or younger tests positive. Both the Russian anti-doping body and WADA were expected to look into the case but neither has published any findings and there is no indication anyone else is facing anti-doping charges in the case.

“The doping of children is unforgivable,” the Montreal-based WADA said Monday. “Doctors, coaches or other support personnel who are found to have provided performance-enhancing substances to minors should face the full force of the world anti-doping code.”

The appeal case came to CAS to challenge a Russian anti-doping tribunal verdict in late 2022 that Valieva was not at fault. That ruling suggested disqualifying her only from the national championships and letting her keep her Olympic results and gold medal.

WADA asked CAS to impose a four-year ban and to disqualify Valieva from the Olympics. The ISU requested a two-year ban and disqualification.

“WADA took this appeal to CAS in the interests of fairness for athletes and clean sport and we believe that has been delivered through this decision,” the agency said.

Valieva, who turns 18 in April, has not competed internationally since the Beijing Olympics.

Four days after the closing ceremony, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and five days after that, the ISU banned Russian skaters from its events. That ban is still in place.

Since the Olympics, Valieva has skated on an expanded Russian national competition circuit and in various TV events and ice shows. She is no longer the near-unbeatable skater she appeared to be before the Beijing Olympics and has twice been beaten at the Russian nationals by younger skaters from the same training group under Tutberidze.

Although scores at nationals are often inflated, Valieva’s 237.99 points — third at the Russia championships — would have been the best in the world by more than 10 points this season.

American ice dancer Evan Bates said this past weekend at the national championships that getting a team medal with partner Madison Chock will be meaningful to them.

“We’re the only two athletes from the Beijing team that are still competing — every single one of the rest of us has moved on,” Bates said. “Two years is too long that it’s taken for this decision to be made. We’re just looking forward to getting some closure.”

Whelan was arrested in Russia in December 2018 and was later convicted of espionage, allegations he and the U.S. deny.

On Wednesday, Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Whelan’s sister, Elizabeth Whelan, “to discuss the Administration’s continued efforts to secure Paul’s release from Russia,” the White House said in a statement.

Biden also called Whelan’s parents, according to the White House.

“Since the beginning of the Administration, the President has been personally engaged in the effort to secure the release of Americans held hostage and wrongfully detained around the world, including Paul Whelan and fellow American Evan Gershkovich,” the White House said.

Whelan was working as the head of global security for an auto parts supplier in Michigan when he was arrested. Russia sentenced him in 2020 to 16 years in prison.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The Ostankino District Court of Moscow said in a statement dated Jan. 6 but released Tuesday that Robert Romanov Woodland, who has dual Russian-American nationality, would be detained for two months as part of a “pre-trial restriction.”

He is accused of the “illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, production, processing of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances or their analogues,” the statement said.

Russia’s Criminal Code states that anyone found guilty of this crime can be jailed for eight to 20 years and face an unlimited fine.

Another U.S. national, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, is also detained and awaiting trial in Russia. In November a Moscow court extended his detention until at least January 30.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Navalny, the most prominent and persistent domestic foe of President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on an extremism conviction. He had been incarcerated in central Russia’s Vladimir region, about 140 miles east of Moscow, but supporters said he couldn’t be found beginning on Dec. 6.

They said Monday that he had been traced to a prison colony infamous for severe conditions in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.

“I am your new Santa Claus,” Navalny said in a tweet, referring to his location above the Arctic Circle in the prison in the town of Kharp.

The region is notorious for long and severe winters. The town is about 100 60 miles from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.

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Navalny, who is noted for sharply humorous comments, said he was in a good mood after being transported to the new prison, but suggested the northern winter darkness is discouraging: “I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho,’ but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out of the window, where I can see night, then the evening, and then the night again.”

Prisoner transfers in Russia often result in contact with inmates being lost for weeks. Navalny’s supporters contend the transfer was arranged to keep Navalny out of sight amid Putin’s announcement that he will run for another term as president in the March election.

Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.

He has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.

Putin spoke about Whelan and Gershkovich during his year-end press conference in response to a question about a recent offer the Biden administration made to secure the two men’s release. The U.S. State Department reported it earlier this month, without offering details, and said Russia rejected it.

Putin said that Moscow is not refusing to bring the two Americans back home, wondering somewhat rhetorically in passing: “Why would they commit offenses on Russian soil?”

“We have contacts on this matter with our American partners, there’s a dialogue on this issue. It’s not easy, I won’t go into details right now. But in general, it seems to me that we’re speaking a language each of us understands,” he continued. “I hope we will find a solution. But, I repeat, the American side must hear us and make a decision that will satisfy the Russian side as well.”

Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, has been jailed in Russia since his December 2018 arrest on espionage-related charges that both he and the U.S. government dispute. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was detained in March while on a reporting trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) east of Moscow. He was accused of espionage — Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that the reporter, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” He has been behind bars ever since.

The Lefortovo District Court in Moscow on Nov. 28 ruled to extend his detention until the end of January, and the appeal Gershkovich has filed against that ruling was rejected by the Moscow City Court at a hearing Thursday.

Gershkovich and the Journal deny the allegations, and the U.S. government has declared him to be wrongfully detained. Russian authorities haven’t detailed any evidence to support the espionage charges.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be charged with espionage in Russia since 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. He is being held at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, notorious for its harsh conditions.

Analysts have pointed out that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips after U.S.-Russian tensions soared when Russia sent troops into Ukraine. At least two U.S. citizens arrested in Russia in recent years — including WNBA star Brittney Griner — have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the U.S.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has said it will consider a swap for Gershkovich only after a verdict in his trial. In Russia, espionage trials can last for more than a year.

Lynne Tracy, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, attended the court hearing for Gershkovich’s appeal on Thursday and told reporters that “Evan’s ordeal has now stretched on for over 250 days. His life has been put on hold for over eight months for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Although Evan appeared as sharp and focused as ever today in the courtroom, it is not acceptable that Russian authorities have chosen to use him as a political pawn,” Tracy said after the hearing.

The weeknight turnout surprised and heartened Dasha Yakovleva, one of the organizers, amid recent crackdowns on political activism under President Vladimir Putin.

“Right now, there is no room for political action in Russia. The only place left is our kitchens,” Yakovleva, co-founder of the Feminitive Community women’s group, told The Associated Press. “And here, it was a public place, well-known in Kaliningrad, and everyone spoke out openly about how they see this measure, why they think it’s unjustified, inappropriate.”

Although abortion is still legal and widely available in Russia, recent attempts to restrict it have touched a nerve across the increasingly conservative country. Activists are urging supporters to make official complaints, circulating online petitions and even staging small protests.

While only a proposal for now in Kaliningrad, private clinics elsewhere have begun to stop providing abortions. Nationwide, the Health Ministry has drawn up talking points for doctors to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies, and new regulations soon will make many emergency contraceptives virtually unavailable and drive up the cost of others.

“It’s clear that there is a gradual erosion of abortion access and rights in Russia, and this is similar to what has taken place in the U.S.,” said Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision rescinding a five-decade-old right to abortion has reshaped American abortion policy, shifting power to states. About half of U.S. states have adopted bans or major restrictions, although not all are being enforced due to legal challenges.

In the Soviet Union, abortion laws meant that some women had the procedure multiple times due to difficulties in obtaining contraceptives.

After the USSR’s collapse, government and health experts promoted family planning and birth control, sending abortion rates falling. At the same time, laws allowed women to terminate a pregnancy up until 12 weeks without any conditions; and until 22 weeks for many “social reasons,” like divorce, unemployment or income.

That changed under Putin, who has forged a powerful alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, promoting “traditional values” and seeking to boost population growth. Health Minister Mikhail Murashko has condemned women for prioritizing education and career over childbearing.

Over the decades, the number of abortions in Russia fell from 4.1 million in 1990 to 517,000 in 2021.

Only in instances of rape is an abortion legally allowed between 12 and 22 weeks. Some regions hold “Days of Silence,” when public clinics don’t provide them. Women must wait 48 hours or even a week -– depending on what stage of pregnancy -– between their first appointment and the abortion, in case they reconsider. They also are offered psychological consultations designed to discourage abortions, according to state-issued guidelines reviewed by AP.

Health authorities have introduced an online “motivational questionnaire” outlining state support if women continue the pregnancy, according to a state clinic gynecologist who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

She said the waiting periods were psychologically hard for some of her patients. “During that week (of waiting), she might start getting nauseous and experience other symptoms of pregnancy,” she added. “They don’t understand the point.”

State clinics in one region referred women to a priest before getting an abortion. Authorities maintained the consultation was voluntary, but some women told the media they had to get a priest to sign off to get an abortion.

The anti-abortion push comes as Russian women appear to be in no rush to have more children amid the war in Ukraine and economic uncertainty. Sales of abortion pills in 2022 were up 60%, according to Nikolay Bespalov, development director of the RNC Pharma analytical company. They fell 35% this year, still higher than pre-2022 levels. Sales of contraceptive medications also have been rising in 2022-23, he said.

A recent Health Ministry decree restricted circulation of abortion pills, used to terminate pregnancies in the first trimester. The decree puts mifepristone and misoprostol, used in the pills, on a registry of controlled substances requiring strict record-keeping and storage.

For hospitals and clinics, where the pills are usually dispensed, the move will add more paperwork but not much else, said Dr. Yekaterina Hivrich, head of gynecology at Lahta Clinic, a private clinic in St. Petersburg.

But it will affect the availability of emergency contraceptives, sometimes known as morning-after pills, which are taken within days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy. Three out of six brands available in Russia contain mifepristone in a lower dose, meaning they’ll be severely restricted once the decree takes effect Sept. 1, 2024.

They will require a special prescription, and not all pharmacies will stock them, said Irina Fainman, an activist in the northern region of Karelia, adding that getting a prescription takes time that women might not have when they need the pills.

The Health Ministry did not respond to questions on whether it will exclude morning-after pills in the decree. Officials earlier promised it won’t affect those pills, but some pharmacies already list those with mifepristone as available only under strict prescription conditions.

After the restrictions were announced, Fainman said she and other activists stocked up on the pills to distribute in case of shortages.

Sales of emergency contraceptives soared 71% through August 2023, over the same period last year, according to Bespalov. Those containing mifepristone account for about half the market. New measures likely will increase the cost of unrestricted medications and possibly lead to short-term shortages.

Senior lawmaker Pyotr Tolstoy said that by spring, lawmakers would strive to adopt a nationwide ban on abortion in private clinics, where about 20% took place in recent years, according to state statistics.

Conservative lawmakers failed to enact such a ban before, but the Health Ministry now says it is ready to consider it.

To Irina Volynets, an abortion opponent and children’s rights ombudswoman in the Tatarstan region, “it gives hope that this procedure will be taken out of private clinics” eventually. She also wants increased state support for women with children as an incentive for boosting birthrates.

Regional authorities have tried to get private clinics to stop offering abortions, with varying success. Kaliningrad is mulling a region-wide ban. In Tatarstan, about a third of all private clinics no longer provide them, officials said. In the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals, three clinics agreed to halt them.

“It’s important to understand that the pressure on women will be growing” even in the absence of a total ban, said Kaliningrad psychotherapist and activist Lina Zharin, who helped organize the recent bookstore meeting. An online petition against the ban in Kaliningrad has gathered nearly 27,000 signatures.

In seven other regions, the Health Ministry is using another pilot project: having gynecologists try to get women to reconsider having an abortion.

A document obtained by AP and cited by other media outlines language doctors are told to use, including saying pregnancy is “a beautiful and natural condition for every woman,” while an abortion is “harmful to your health and a risk of developing complications.”

Natalya Moskvitina, founder of Women For Life, which aids women who decide against abortion, said she helped develop the instructions and is introducing similar scripts for doctors in several regions.

Moskvitina made headlines in August after the region of Mordovia adopted a law she helped draft to ban “encouraging” abortions. At least one other region is considering a similar ban. Her program, which instructs doctors to congratulate women on being pregnant and gives baby-themed presents and information on support resources, has driven the abortion rate down 40% in Mordovia, she and local officials said.

For women with doubts about abortion, such conversations might indeed help them reach a decision but for others, they could be deeply uncomfortable.

Olga Mindolina was contemplating an abortion in 2020, traumatized by an earlier, difficult pregnancy. But when a doctor in a state clinic in the western city of Voronezh asked her what she wanted to do, she said she didn’t know -– and was told, “In this case, you should give birth.”

A clinic psychologist told her that women sometimes regret abortion, advising her to talk to her husband. A lawyer also told her about state benefits she could get if she gave birth. Mindolina decided to continue the pregnancy.

Anastasia, a Muscovite who sought an abortion in 2020, said it “wasn’t very pleasant” when a doctor urged her to change her mind.

“I simply don’t want any children,” she told AP, asking that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals.

Dr. Lyubov Yeroveyeva, a gynecologist who spearheaded family planning projects in the 1990s, believes the key is preventing unwanted pregnancies with education about birth control and making contraceptives widely available.

Instead of talking a woman out of an abortion, authorities should “do everything so she doesn’t have to seek one,” she said.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty editor Alsu Kurmasheva is the second U.S. journalist to be detained in Russia this year. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested for alleged spying in March.

Kurmasheva, an editor with RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir service, is being held in a temporary detention center, said Tatar-Inform, a state-held news agency in the Tatarstan republic.

The Committee to Protect Journalists media rights organization called the accusations “spurious,” demanding that the charges be dropped and Kurmasheva released.

Tatar-Inform posted video showing Kurmasheva being marched into an administrative building accompanied by four men, two of them wearing balaclavas.

Tatar-Inform said that authorities accused Kurmasheva of collecting information about Russia’s military activities “in order to transmit information to foreign sources,” suggesting that she received information about university teachers who were mobilized into the Russian army.

It said she faces charges of failing to register as a “foreign agent” in her capacity as a person collecting information on Russian military activities. and could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

“Alsu is a highly respected colleague, devoted wife, and dedicated mother to two children,” RFE/RL head Jeffrey Gedmin said. “She needs to be released, so she can return to her family immediately.”

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said it was aware of the reports of Kurmasheva’s arrest. “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas,” said an embassy spokesperson who did not give further details.

Kurmasheva, who lives in Prague with her family, was stopped at Kazan International Airport on June 2 after traveling to Russia for a family emergency on May 20, according to RFE/RL.

Officials at the airport confiscated Kurmasheva’s U.S. and Russian passports and she was fined for failing to register her U.S. passport with Russian authorities. She was waiting for her passports to be returned when the new charge was filed on Wednesday, RFE/RL said.

“At that time it was clear they did not have anything on her, so maybe it was like a matter of intimidation. And then it took them three months to decide how would they, you know, package the case against her,” Galina Arapova of Russia’s Mass Media Defense Center told The Associated Press.

RFE/RL was told to register by Russian authorities as a foreign agent in 2017. It has brought a case at the European Court of Human Rights challenging Russia’s use of foreign agent laws that resulted in the organization being fined millions of dollars.

Kurmasheva reported on ethnic minority communities in the Tatarstan and Bashkortostan republics in Russia, including projects to protect and preserve the Tatar language and culture despite “increased pressure” on Tatars from Russian authorities, her employer said.

Analysts have pointed out that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips after U.S.-Russia tensions soared when Moscow sent troops into Ukraine. At least two U.S. citizens arrested in Russia in recent years — including WNBA star Brittney Griner — have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the U.S.

Arapova said Kurmasheva’s case is quite different from that of Gershkovic, the Wall Street Journal reporter, even though she holds U.S. citizenship.

“She was attacked because she is a Russian journalist. Second, she belongs to a foreign media, which was already regarded as a foreign agent and with which Russian authorities had a longstanding conflict on foreign agent legislation,” she said.

“Journalism is not a crime, and Kurmasheva’s detention is yet more proof that Russia is determined to stifle independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, the Europe and Asia coordinator for New York-based CPJ.

Gershkovich has appeared in court several times since his arrest and unsuccessfully appealed his detention.

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

Gershkovich and The Wall Street Journal deny the allegations, and the U.S. government has declared him to be wrongfully detained. Russian authorities haven’t detailed any evidence to support the espionage charges. Court proceedings against him are closed, because prosecutors say details of the case are classified.

The Defense Ministry didn’t provide any evidence for its claims nor any details about whether there were any damage or casualties.

It also said Russian aircraft thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to deploy a group of soldiers by sea to the western side of Russian-annexed Crimea.

The force attempted to land on Cape Tarkhankut, on Crimea’s western end, using a high-speed boat and three jet skis, the ministry said.

Moscow’s claims could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian officials made no immediate comment.

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The Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, has been a frequent target of Ukrainian attacks. The region has been the key hub supporting the invasion.

Ukraine is pressing on with a slow-moving counteroffensive it launched three months ago, even as uncertainty grows over the scale of the future supply of weapons and ammunition from its Western allies.

Adm. Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s Military Committee, sounded the alarm about depleted stockpiles.

With the war of attrition likely continuing through winter into next year, Bauer said of weapons systems and ammunition supplies: “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.”

He urged the defense industry to boost production “at a much higher tempo. And we need large volumes,” he told the Warsaw Security Forum, an annual conference, on Tuesday.

Also, the Pentagon has warned Congress that it is running low on money to replace weapons the U.S. has sent to Ukraine.

Concern about the commitment of Kyiv’s allies has also grown amid political turmoil in the United States amid the unprecedented and dramatic ouster Tuesday of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Some in the House Republican majority, and many GOP voters, oppose sending more military aid to Ukraine. The U.S. is by far Ukraine’s largest military supplier.

The concerns prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to hold a phone call Tuesday with key allies in Europe, as well as the leaders of Canada and Japan, to coordinate support for Ukraine.

The call came three days after Biden signed legislation hastily sent to him by Congress that kept the federal government funded but left off billions in funding for Ukraine’s war effort that the White House had vigorously backed.

___

The highest court in sports began a closed-door hearing set to last at least three days. Valieva, who was 15 at the Olympics and is now 17, was expected to testify by video link from Russia in a case that was slow-walked in her home country and could now deliver a verdict by the end of the year.

Awaiting the outcome are nine American skaters who could become Olympic champions in the team event after finishing second in Beijing behind Valieva and the Russians.

Valieva’s defense has been that her positive test for a banned heart medication was caused by accidental contamination — maybe from a glass or plate — by tablets her grandfather claimed he took.

The first Russian anti-doping tribunal to judge the case during the Olympics in February 2022 said Valieva and her legal team “intend to conduct further investigation and present the results” at future hearings in the case.

The future hearing has now started, opening more than 19 months after an initial CAS panel let Valieva continue skating in Beijing despite a failed doping test on her record.

Valieva’s lawyers did not speak to reporters when they arrived at court on Tuesday.

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This appeal hearing was brought by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Skating Union. They challenged a Russian ruling belatedly announced in January that Valieva, as an underage minor at the time, was not at fault and should keep her Olympic results.

WADA has asked the three CAS judges to ban Valieva for four years — until December 2025 — and disqualify her from the Olympics.

“We want a just outcome of the case, based on the facts,” WADA spokesman James Fitzgerald said, adding the Montreal-based agency will “continue to push for this matter to be concluded without further undue delay.”

The ISU wants a ban of at least two years and disqualification. The Russian anti-doping agency also joined the appeal and suggested a reprimand would do.

Valieva’s legal team will argue that CAS has no jurisdiction, the court has said, and alternatively that she was not at fault so a reprimand is enough.

The three CAS judges come from Australia, the United States and France — picked respectively by the court, WADA and Valieva’s lawyers.

The United States figure skating team could be upgraded to gold in an event where no medal ceremony ever was held. In Beijing, Japan took bronze and Canada placed fourth.

“We share their frustrations in how this case has dragged on,” Fitzgerald said about the skaters’ long wait to get any medals.

On the same day, Feb. 7, 2022, that Valieva’s free skate in Beijing helped seal the Olympic team title, a laboratory in Sweden notified sports authorities of her positive test from a sample given six weeks earlier at the Russian national championships. The lab later cited staffing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The medal ceremony was postponed and a frenetic week of legal hearings in Moscow and Beijing led to the first CAS panel letting her enter the women’s individual event as the gold-medal favorite. Those three judges, who are not involved this week, ruled Valieva faced serious harm in her career if she had been denied the right to compete because the anti-doping system’s “failure to function effectively.”

Amid the intense and stressful attention on her, Valieva produced a mistake-filled free skate and finished fourth.

The reaction rinkside by Valieva’s coach, Eteri Tutberidze — sternly criticizing her 15-year-old protégé’s errors — fueled further controversy.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach spoke in Beijing of “a tremendous coldness, it was chilling to see this.” He also rebuked a Russian journalist who suggested the IOC was partly responsible for bullying a child.

Bach replied “the ones who have administered this drug in her body, these are the ones who are guilty.”

Tutberidze, who also coached the individual gold and silver medalists in Beijing, could also be investigated. Anti-doping rules require an investigation of the entourage when a minor is implicated in doping. That, however, would be in Russia, where this year she got an honor from the Kremlin.

Valieva has not skated internationally since Beijing because of an ISU ban on Russians following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

The increase also complicates the global fight against inflation and feeds Russia’s war chest. That poses problems for politicians as well as the people having to spend more to get to work, transport the world’s goods or harvest fields.

Here are things to know about the recent increase — and where prices might be going:

Above all, Saudi Arabia’s decision to cut back how much oil it sends to global markets has pushed prices higher.

The world’s second-largest oil supplier has slashed production by 1 million barrels a day since July and decided this month to extend the cut through the end of the year.

Russia, Saudi Arabia’s ally in the OPEC+ oil producers’ coalition, also extended its own cut of 300,000 barrels a month through 2023.

Simply, tighter supply means higher prices.

International benchmark Brent oil traded at just under $94 per barrel Monday, up from $90 before the extension on Sept. 5 and from $74 before the Saudi cut was first announced. U.S. oil traded at around $90.50, up from $68 before the Saudi cut.

Some analysts think oil could hit $100 a barrel based on robust demand and limited supply. But that’s far from the only view.

Oil prices can be volatile, and while they might briefly top $100 in the coming months, they’re unlikely to stay there, said Jorge Leon, senior vice president for oil markets at Rystad Energy. He foresees prices in the low $90s on average in the last three months of the year.

That’s still high historically, he said, supported by “resilient” demand for fuel to drive and fly.

The Saudi cuts were a unilateral move outside the framework of the OPEC+ alliance, meaning the kingdom can make changes as needed to quickly respond to shifting market conditions.

Leon said the Saudis will review the cuts each month — and could add barrels back if prices spike to levels that could seriously worsen inflation in countries buying oil. Excessive price increases could mean central banks worldwide hike interest rates further or keep them higher for longer.

“I don’t think it will be clever for the Saudis to push that hard,” Leon said. “The last thing you want to do is fuel inflation again with much higher oil prices. That’s going to kill economic growth, and lower growth is going to mean lower oil demand at the end of the day.”

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A big question is demand for fuel, which is picking up along with rebounding travel following the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. A robust U.S. economy increases demand for oil — and the price — while weak growth in China and Europe has the opposite effect.

“We see the upside potential for the oil price as being virtually used up and if anything envisage setback potential in view of the weak economy,” said Thu Lan Nguyen, Commerzbank head of commodities research who foresees oil at $85 per barrel by year’s end. “The oil price is only likely to climb more lastingly once the economic outlook begins to brighten, which should be the case next year.”

Another factor is financial speculation, and it appears investors are piling into the oil market with bets that prices will rise.

“Much of the price surge beyond $85 per barrel is due to a flood of speculative money, while fundamentally there is still plenty of oil in the world to meet demand for now,” said Gary Peach, oil markets analyst at Energy Intelligence.

Plus, more Iranian oil may come on the market as the U.S. “turns a blind eye” on enforcing sanctions to keep prices from rising further, Leon said. That could add 200,000 to 300,000 barrels a day.

Costlier oil feeds through to higher prices for gasoline and diesel, especially in the U.S., where roughly half the pump price reflects the cost of crude — the rest is marketing, taxes and other costs.

Crude is a smaller share of gasoline and diesel prices in Europe because fuel taxes are much higher there.

Average U.S. pump prices are still well below the record $5 per gallon seen in summer 2022. But at $3.85 per gallon, they’re still up 15 cents from a year ago. Oil costs are keeping gas prices high even as driving demand drops with the end of summer vacations and plentiful gasoline stocks, according to auto club AAA.

Diesel prices have risen as well, along with higher oil costs and refineries facing shortages of the specific kinds of crude best for making diesel. Refineries also are choosing to produce jet fuel instead, chasing profits as air travel rebounds. A gallon of diesel cost $4.58 last week, up from $4.34 a month ago.

That hurts farmers, who use a lot of diesel, and adds to the price of consumer goods transported by truck, which is pretty much everything.

Diesel supplies got even tighter Friday after Russia said it would halt the export of refined oil products to hold down fuel prices at home.

Oil is Russia’s main moneymaker, so higher prices help the Kremlin pay for its invasion of Ukraine and weather sweeping Western sanctions aimed at crushing its wartime economy.

The recent rise in oil prices, along with a cutback in the discount that sanctions forced Russia to offer Asian customers, means Moscow will earn “significantly more revenue from those exports,” said Benjamin Hilgenstock, senior economist at the Kyiv School of Economics.

The additional revenue could reach an estimated $17 billion this year and $33 billion next year, he said in an online talk hosted by the Brussels-based European Policy Center.

Russia has lost some $100 billion in oil revenue following a European Union import ban and a $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the Group of Seven major economies, which bars Western insurers and shippers from handling oil priced above that level.

Russia, however, has increasingly found ways around the cap, including using a fleet of ghost tankers masking their ownership and origin of the crude they carry.

Any additional export earnings help support Russia’s currency and what it can import — including weapons components.

U.S. President Joe Biden has faced criticism from Republican lawmakers to encourage more oil drilling and scrap his support for electric vehicles.

But that criticism largely overlooks the rise in U.S. oil production over the past year. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that oil production averaged 12.8 million barrels a day in June, up 1 million barrels from 12 months ago, close to the levels achieved before the pandemic began in 2020.

Biden has said he considers oil production essential to keep the economy going as a bridge to a future with EVs and renewable energy.

Still, the White House views the oil market worldwide as being undersupplied, in line with recent OPEC data that indicates there will likely be a worldwide shortfall of 3 million barrels a day. The administration is also in touch with domestic and international producers on longtime supply needs, trying to ensure that the risk of higher oil prices does not disrupt economic growth.

___

Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed from Washington.

In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly last week, Yoon said South Korea “will not sit idly by” if North Korea and Russia agree to weapons deals that would pose a threat to the South.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un‘s trip to Russia earlier this month to meet President Vladimir Putin and visit key military sites raised international concern about a possible push by North Korea to receive sophisticated nuclear and weapons technologies in return for replenishing Russia’s conventional arms inventory depleted by its war with Ukraine.

“Puppet traitor Yoon Suk Yeol, even at the 78th U.N. General Assembly, malignantly slandered the relations between (North Korea) and Russia,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary.

Without addressing the worries about a possible weapons deal with Russia, KCNA said it’s “quite natural” and a “legitimate right” for neighboring countries to keep close ties with each other.

“It’s self-evident that such a guy with a trash-like brain cannot understand the profound and enormous meaning of the development of (North Korea)-Russia friendly relations,” KCNA said. “No one in the world would lend an ear to the hysteric fit of puppet traitor Yoon Suk Yeol, who is only wearing disgraceful ill fames of ‘political immature,’ ‘diplomatic idiot’ and ‘incompetent chief executive.’”

Koo Byoungsam, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Unification Ministry, said the KCNA insults demonstrated North Korea’s “substandard system that lacks basic etiquette and common sense.”

Since taking office last year, Yoon, a conservative former prosecutor, has sought to strengthen South Korea’s military alliance with the United States, drawing an angry response from North Korea. Monday’s KCNA dispatch accused Yoon of “voluntarily acting as a servile trumpeter and loudspeaker for the U.S.”

Also Monday, the South Korean and U.S. navies began three days of joint naval drills off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast to improve their joint operational capability, according to South Korea’s navy. North Korea views South Korean-U.S. military exercises as invasion rehearsals and typically reacts with its own missile tests.

The U.S. and South Korea have warned that Russia and North Korea will face undefined consequences if they enter into weapons transfer deals in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban any weapons trade with North Korea. Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, endorsed those U.N. resolutions.

In his U.N. speech last Wednesday, Yoon said “It is paradoxical that a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, entrusted as the ultimate guardian of world peace, would wage war by invading another sovereign nation and receive arms and ammunition from a regime that blatantly violates Security Council resolutions.”

Yoon said that if North Korea “acquires the information and technology necessary” to enhance its weapons of mass destruction in exchange for giving conventional weapons to Russia, that would also be unacceptable.

North Korea is notorious for using crude invectives against South Korean and U.S. leaders. It called previous South Korean Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye “a rat” and “a prostitute” respectively. It described former U.S. President Donald Trump as “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and called Barack Obama a monkey.

Seven people were injured in Kyiv, including a 9-year-old girl, reported Mayor Vitalii Klitschko, and some residential and commercial buildings were damaged.

At least six strikes hit the Slobidskyi district of Kharkiv, damaging civilian infrastructure damaged, said regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov. The city’s mayor added that two people had been sent to hospitals.

Five were injured and at least one person was buried under rubble in Cherkasy, where a social infrastructure building was damaged, said regional Governor Ihor Taburets.

Regional Governor Vitalii Koval reported strikes in the city of Rivne in the northwest region of the same name, without immediately providing details.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it. So I resigned,” Nora Dannehy told Connecticut state legislators during her confirmation hearing as a nominee to the state Supreme Court. It marked the first time Dannehy has spoken publicly about her sudden resignation from the probe overseen by former special counsel John Durham.

Durham, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, was appointed in the spring of 2019 by Barr to investigate potential wrongdoing by government officials and others in the early days of the FBI probe into ties between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Trump expected the investigation to expose what he and his supporters alleged was a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his campaign, but the slow pace of the probe – and the lack of blockbuster findings – contributed to a deep wedge between the president and Barr by the time the attorney general resigned in December 2020.

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The investigation concluded last May with underwhelming results: A single guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer, resulting in probation, and two acquittals at trial by juries.

Dannehy, who was the first woman to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, told Connecticut lawmakers that politics had “never played a role” in how she was expected to carry out her job as a federal prosecutor and “that was the Justice Department I thought I was returning to” when she ultimately joined Durham’s team.

“I had been taught and spent my entire career at Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner,” she said. “In the spring and summer of 2020, I had growing concerns that this Russia investigation was not being conducted in that way. Attorney General Barr began to speak more publicly and specifically about the ongoing criminal investigation. I thought these public comments violated DOJ guidelines.”

Dannehy said Barr’s comments were “certainly taken in a political way by reports. Whether he intended that or not, I don’t know.”

She declined to detail what happened during her time with the investigation because it involved highly classified information.

While Durham’s report did identify significant problems with the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, including major errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign official, many of the findings had already been revealed by the Justice Department inspector general. And though Trump had looked to the report to malign the FBI as prejudiced against him, Durham concluded that the FBI’s mistakes were mostly a result of “confirmation bias” rather than partisanship or outright political bias.

Durham would not answer questions about Dannehy’s resignation during a June appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, saying the issue was not part of the report that he had been summoned to talk about.

Dannehy, a 62-year-old Connecticut native, served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut from 2008 to 2010. She later was appointed deputy attorney general for the state of Connecticut before taking a job with United Technologies Corporation as associate general counsel for global ethics and compliance.

Her nomination cleared the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee by a vote of 30-4 on Wednesday. The full General Assembly is scheduled to vote next week.

The decision means Gershkovich, 31, will remain jailed at least until Nov. 30, unless his appeal is heard in the meantime and he is released — an unlikely outcome.

Before the session was closed, Gershkovich appeared in the glass defendants’ cage, smiling at fellow journalists and wearing a yellow sweater and blue jeans. He was detained in March while on a reporting trip to the city of Yekaterinburg, about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) east of Moscow.

There was initial confusion about the outcome when the state news agency Tass reported the court had rejected Gershkovich’s appeal, but it later changed its report to say the case was sent to the lower court.

The court proceedings are closed because prosecutors say details of the criminal case are classified. Gershkovich last appeared in court in August when a judge ruled he must stay in jail until the end of November. Tuesday’s hearing stemmed from that decision.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy made her fourth visit to Gershkovich on Friday, two days after the reporter’s parents appeared at U.N. headquarters and called on world leaders to urge Russia to free him. Tracy said later that Gershkovich “remains strong and is keeping up with the news,” including his parents’ appeal.

“The plight of U.S. citizens wrongfully detained in Russia remains a top priority for me, my team at the embassy, and the entire U.S. government,” Tracy told reporters outside court.

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

Gershkovich and the Journal deny the allegations, and the U.S. government declared him to be wrongfully detained. Russian authorities haven’t detailed any evidence to support the espionage charges.

He is being held at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, notorious for its harsh conditions.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to face espionage charges in Russia since 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB.

Analysts have pointed out that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips after U.S.-Russian tensions soared when Russia sent troops into Ukraine. At least two U.S. citizens arrested in Russia in recent years — including WNBA star Brittney Griner — have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the U.S.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has said it would consider a swap for Gershkovich only after a verdict in his trial. In Russia, espionage trials can last for more than a year.

The talks with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu came after Kim on Friday was shown some of Russia’s most advanced weapons systems deployed for its war on Ukraine, including nuclear-capable bombers and hypersonic missiles, and a key warship of its Pacific fleet, the Korean Central News Agency said.

Kim’s trip, highlighted by a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, has underscored how their interests are aligning in the face of separate, intensifying confrontations with the West. U.S. and South Korean officials have said North Korea could provide badly needed munitions for Putin’s war on Ukraine in exchange for sophisticated Russian weapons technology that would advance Kim’s nuclear ambitions.

While his predominant focus is on military cooperation, Kim also appears to be using his trip to encourage broader exchanges between the countries as he tries to break out of diplomatic isolation.

The governor of Russia’s Primorye region, which includes Vladivostok, said he plans to meet with Kim on Sunday. Gov. Oleg Kozhemyako said on his messaging app channel they would discuss exchange programs for schoolchildren to attend summer camps in one another’s country and other ways to cooperate in sports, tourism and culture. Russian media said Kim may also visit food industry businesses in Primorye.

A day after visiting an aircraft plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur that produces Russia’s most powerful fighter jets, Kim on Saturday traveled to an airport near the port city of Vladivostok, where Shoigu and other senior military officials gave him an up-close look at Russia’s strategic bombers and other warplanes.

All the Russian warplanes shown to Kim were among the types that have seen active use in the war in Ukraine, including the Tu-160, Tu-95 and Tu-22 bombers that have regularly launched cruise missiles.

During Kim’s visit, Shoigu and Lt. Gen. Sergei Kobylash, the commander of the Russian long-range bomber force, confirmed for the first time that the Tu-160 had recently received new cruise missiles with a range of more than 6,500 kilometers (over 4,040 miles).

Shoigu, who had met Kim during a rare visit to North Korea in July, also showed Kim another of Russia’s latest missiles, the hypersonic Kinzhal, carried by the MiG-31 fighter jet, that saw its first combat during the war in Ukraine.

Kim and Shoigu later traveled to Vladivostok, where they inspected the Admiral Shaposhnikov frigate. Russia’s navy commander, Adm. Nikolai Yevmenov, briefed Kim on the ship’s capabilities and weapons, which include long-range Kalibr cruise missiles that Russian warships have regularly fired at targets in Ukraine.

KCNA, which has reported Kim’s activities in Russia a day late while crafting the details to meet government propaganda purposes, said Kim was accompanied on Saturday’s visits by his top military officials, including his defense minister and the top commanders of his air force and navy.

Following a luncheon, Kim and Shoigu talked about the regional security environment and exchanged views on “practical issues arising in further strengthening the strategic and tactical coordination, cooperation and mutual exchange between the armed forces of the two countries,” KCNA said.

In their July meeting, Kim gave Shoigu a similar inspection of North Korean weapons systems before inviting him to a massive parade in the capital, Pyongyang, where he rolled out his most powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to target the United States.

Kim’s visits to military and technology sites this week possibly hint at what he wants from Russia, perhaps in exchange for supplying munitions to refill Putin’s declining reserves as his invasion of Ukraine becomes a drawn-out war of attrition.

Kim’s meeting with Putin was held at Russia’s main spaceport, a location that pointed to his desire for Russian assistance in his efforts to acquire space-based reconnaissance assets and missile technologies.

Experts have said potential military cooperation between the countries could include efforts to modernize North Korea’s outdated air force, which relies on warplanes sent from the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Kim in recent months has also refocused on strengthening the country’s navy, which analysts say could be driven by ambitions to obtain Russia’s sophisticated technologies for ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-propelled submarines as well as to initiate joint naval exercises between Russia and North Korea.

Later Saturday, Kim visited a local theater to watch Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet performance. KCNA said Kim received a rousing ovation by people at the theater and expressed “deep thanks to the performers and the theater for their impressive and elegant ballet of high artistic value.”

Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency said Kim left after the first act.

Zelenskyy’s trip comes as Congress is debating President Joe Biden’s request to provide as much as $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine as it fights the Russian invasion.

An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive visit, said Zelenskyy will meet with Biden at the White House next Thursday. The trip to the Capitol was confirmed by two congressional aides granted anonymity to discuss the plans.

The Ukrainian president made a wartime visit to Washington in December 2022 and delivered an impassioned address to a joint meeting of Congress. At the time it was his first known trip outside his country since Russia invaded in February of that year.

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In his speech to cheering lawmakers, Zelenskyy thanked Americans for helping to fund the war effort and said that the money is “not charity,” but an “investment” in global security and democracy.

Details of Zelenskyy’s visit next week were not yet being made public. It was first reported by Punchbowl News.

The White House National Security Council declined to comment on Zelenskyy’s plans, including whether he would meet with Biden at the White House.

Meanwhile, the Treasury and State departments announced they were imposing new sanctions on more than 150 individuals and entities connected with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. was “continuing our relentless work to target Russia’s military supply chains and deprive (Russian President Vladimir) Putin of the equipment, technology, and services he needs to wage his barbaric war on Ukraine.”

Congress is increasingly divided over providing additional funding for Ukraine as the war is well into its second year. Biden has sought a package of $13.1 billion in additional military aid for Ukraine and $8.5 billion for humanitarian support. It also includes $2.3 billion for financing and to catalyze donors through the World Bank.

But conservative Republican lawmakers have been pushing for broad federal spending cuts and some of those allied with Donald Trump, the former president, are specifically looking to stop money to Ukraine.

Congress is working to pass its annual appropriations bills before a Sept. 30 deadline to keep the U.S. government running.

After touring launch pads with Putin at a remote space base in Russia’s Far East, Kim expressed “full and unconditional support” and said Pyongyang will always stand with Moscow on the “anti-imperialist” front.

The leaders met at the Vostochny Cosmodrome for a summit that underscores how their interests are aligning in the face of their countries’ separate, intensifying confrontations with the United States.

North Korea may have tens of millions of aging artillery shells and rockets based on Soviet designs that could give a huge boost to the Russian army in Ukraine, analysts say.

But either buying arms from or providing rocket technology to North Korea would violate international sanctions that Russia has supported in the past.

The decision to meet at Cosmodrome, Russia’s most important launch center on its own soil, suggests that Kim is seeking Russian help developing military reconnaissance satellites, which he has described as crucial to enhance the threat of his nuclear-capable missiles. In recent months, North Korea has repeatedly failed to put its first military spy satellite into orbit.

Putin welcomed Kim’s limousine, brought from Pyongyang in the North Korean leader’s special armored train, at the entrance to the launch facility with a handshake that lasted around 40 seconds. In his opening remarks, Putin welcomed Kim to Russia and said he was glad to see him, saying the talks would cover economic cooperation, humanitarian issues and the “situation in the region.”

Kim, in turn, expressed support for Moscow’s efforts to defend its interests, in an apparent reference to the war in Ukraine. “Russia is waging a sacred fight to defend its sovereignty, security interests and justice,” the North Korean leader said. “I take this opportunity to affirm that we will always stand with Russia on the anti-imperialist front.”

The two men began their meeting with a tour of a Soyuz-2 space rocket launch facility, at which Kim peppered a Russian space official with questions about the rockets.

Kim and Putin then met together with their delegations and later one-on-one, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. After the talks, the Russian president threw an official lunch for Kim, Russian state media reported.

The meeting came hours after North Korea fired two ballistic missiles toward the sea, extending a highly provocative run in North Korean weapons testing since the start of 2022, as Kim used the distraction caused by Putin’s war on Ukraine to accelerate his weapons development.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t immediately say how far the North Korean missiles flew. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the missiles landed in the waters outside of the country’s exclusive economic zones and there were no reports of damages to vessels or aircraft.

Official photos showed that Kim was accompanied by Pak Thae Song, chairman of North Korea’s space science and technology committee, and navy Adm. Kim Myong Sik, who are linked with North Korean efforts to acquire spy satellites and nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

Asked whether Russia will help North Korea build satellites, Putin was quoted by Russian state media as saying “that’s why we have come here. The DPRK leader shows keen interest in rocket technology. They’re trying to develop space, too,” using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Asked about military cooperation, Putin said “we will talk about all issues without a rush. There is time.”

Kim also brought Jo Chun Ryong, a ruling party official in charge of munitions policies, who joined him on recent tours of factories producing artillery shells and missile, according to South Korea.

Despite the recent frequency of North Korean missile firings, Wednesday’s launches on the eve of the summit came as a surprise. South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, said it was the first time the North launched a missile while Kim was traveling overseas.

Kim could have ordered the launches to make a point to Putin about North Korea’s defense posture and show that he remains in close control of the country’s military activities even while abroad, said Moon Seong Mook, an analyst with the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy.

Moon, a retired South Korean brigadier general who participated in past inter-Korean military talks, said the North with the launches could have also intended to express its anger toward the United States, after State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a press briefing that Putin was meeting “an international pariah to ask for assistance in a war.”

The United States has accused North Korea of providing Russia with arms, including selling artillery shells to the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Both Russian and North Korean officials denied such claims.

Speculation about military cooperation grew after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited North Korea in July. Kim subsequently toured his weapons factories, which experts said had the dual goal of encouraging the modernization of North Korean weaponry and examining artillery and other supplies that could be exported to Russia.

___

Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia. Associated Press journalists Jim Heintz in Tallinn, Estonia; Aamer Madhani and Matthew Lee in Washington; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Dake Kang and Ng Han Guan in Fangchuan, China; Haruka Nuga and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo; and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed.

Ressa and her online news organization Rappler had faced five tax evasion charges but a court acquitted her of four of the charges in January. A different court heard the fifth charge and acquitted her Tuesday.

“Facts wins, truth wins, justice wins,” she told reporters outside the courthouse.

Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov were awarded the 2021 Nobel for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression by fighting for the survival of their news organizations and defying government efforts to shut them.

She had said the charges against her were politically motivated as Rappler was critical of Duterte’s brutal crackdown on illegal drugs that left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead. The International Criminal Court is investigating the crackdown as a possible crime against humanity.

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Rappler also criticized Duterte’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic including prolonged lockdowns that deepened poverty, caused one of the country’s worst recessions and sparked allegations of corruption in government medical purchases.

Ressa also said there appeared to be a “lifting of fear” under the Philippines’ new leader — Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who is the namesake son of the dictator overthrown in the army-backed “people power” uprising in 1986.

Ressa is still appealing to the Supreme Court against an online libel conviction, while Rappler is challenging a closure order issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“You’ve got to have faith,” Ressa said. “The acquittal now strengthens our resolve to continue with the justice system, to submit ourselves to the court despite the political harassment, despite the attacks on press freedom. It shows that the court system works and we hope to see the remaining charges dismissed.”

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim boarded his personal train Sunday afternoon, accompanied by unspecified members of the country’s ruling party, government and military.

South Korea‘s military assessed the train crossed into Russia sometime early Tuesday, Jeon Ha Gyu, spokesperson of South Korea’s Defense Ministry, said in a briefing without elaborating on how the military obtained the information.

Officials identified in North Korean state media photos may hint at what Kim might seek from Putin and what he would be willing to give.

Kim Jong Un is apparently bringing Jo Chun Ryong, a ruling party official in charge of munitions policies who accompanied the leader on recent tours of factories producing artillery shells and missiles, said South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

North Korea may have tens of millions of artillery shells and rockets based on Soviet designs that could give a huge boost to the Russian army in Ukraine, analysts say.

Also identified in photos were Pak Thae Song, chairman of North Korea’s space science and technology committee, and Navy Adm. Kim Myong Sik, who are linked with North Korean efforts to acquire spy satellites and nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines. Experts say North Korea would struggle to acquire such capabilities without external help, although it’s not clear if Russia would share such sensitive technologies.

Kim may also seek badly needed energy and food aid, analysts say.

Kim’s delegation likely includes his foreign minister, Choe Sun Hui, and his top two military officials, Korean People’s Army Marshals Ri Pyong Chol and Pak Jong Chon.

Kim and Putin may meet in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, where Putin arrived Monday to attend an international forum that runs through Wednesday, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. Putin’s first meeting with Kim was held in 2019 in the city, which is about 425 miles (680 kilometers) north of Pyongyang.

Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying Putin and Kim will meet after the Vladivostok forum, but the reports didn’t specify when or where.

Peskov said the meeting would include a lunch in Kim’s honor.

Deputy foreign minister Andrei Rudenko said that Russia will inform South Korea about the meeting’s outcome upon request: “The South Koreans have an embassy in Moscow. If they want, we can provide them with the information we have.”

Kim Jong Un is making his first foreign trip since the COVID-19 pandemic, during which North Korea imposed tight border controls for more than three years.

Associated Press journalists near the North Korea-Russia frontier saw a green train with yellow trim similar to one Kim used during previous foreign trips at a station on the North Korean side of a border river on Monday.

U.S. officials released intelligence last week that North Korea and Russia were arranging a meeting between their leaders.

According to U.S. officials, Putin could focus on securing more supplies of North Korean artillery and other ammunition to refill declining reserves as he seeks to rebuff a Ukrainian counteroffensive and show that he’s capable of grinding out a long war of attrition. That could potentially put more pressure on the U.S. and its partners to pursue negotiations as concerns over a protracted conflict grow despite their huge shipments of advanced weaponry to Ukraine in the past 17 months.

“Arms discussions between Russia and the DPRK are expected to continue during Kim Jong Un’s trip to Russia,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “We urge the DPRK to abide by the public commitments that Pyongyang has made to not provide or sell arms to Russia.”

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington will monitor the meeting closely, reminding both countries that “any transfer of arms from North Korea to Russia would be a violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” and that the U.S. “will not hesitate to impose new sanctions.”

After decades of a complicated, hot-and-cold relationship, Russia and North Korea have been drawing closer since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The bond has been driven by Putin’s need for war help and Kim’s efforts to boost the visibility of his partnerships with traditional allies Moscow and Beijing as he tries to break out of diplomatic isolation and have North Korea be part of a united front against Washington.

The United States has accused North Korea of providing Russia with arms, including selling artillery shells to the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Both Russian and North Korean officials denied such claims.

But speculation about the countries’ military cooperation grew after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a rare visit to North Korea in July, when Kim invited him to an arms exhibition and a massive military parade in the capital where he showcased ICBMs designed to target the U.S. mainland.

Following that visit, Kim toured North Korea’s weapons factories, including a facility producing artillery systems where he urged workers to speed up the development and large-scale production of new kinds of ammunition. Experts say Kim’s visits to the factories likely had a dual goal of encouraging the modernization of North Korean weaponry and examining artillery and other supplies that could be exported to Russia.

___

Associated Press journalists Jim Heintz in Tallinn, Estonia; Aamer Madhani and Matthew Lee in Washington; and Dake Kang and Ng Han Guan in Fangchuan, China, contributed to this report.

A brief statement on the Kremlin’s website said the visit is at Putin’s invitation and would take place “in the coming days.” It also was reported by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, which said the leaders would meet — without specifying when and where.

“The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un will meet and have a talk with Comrade Putin during the visit,” it said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said delegations from both countries will meet, but he didn’t confirm plans for a bilateral session between Putin and Kim, saying the leaders will meet one-on-one “if necessary.” The visit would be Kim’s first foreign trip since the COVID-19 pandemic, which had forced North Korea to enforce tight border controls for more than three years to shield its poor health care system. While Kim has shown to be more comfortable using planes than his famously flight-adverse father, he has also used his personal train for previoius meetings with Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and former U.S. President Donald Trump, reviving a symbol of his family’s dynastic rule.

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Associated Press journalists near the North Korea-Russia frontier saw a green train with yellow trim — similar to one used by the reclusive Kim during previous foreign trips — at a station on the North Korean side of a border river.

It was unclear whether Kim was on the train, which was seen moving back and forth between the station and the approach to the bridge that connects the countries. It had not crossed the bridge as of 7 p.m.

Citing unidentified South Korean government sources, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported the train likely left the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on Sunday evening and that a Kim-Putin meeting is possible as early as Tuesday.

The Yonhap news agency and some other media published similar reports. Japan’s Kyodo news agency cited Russian officials as saying Kim was possibly heading for Russia in his personal train.

South Korea’s Presidential Office, Defense Ministry and National Intelligence Service didn’t immediately confirm those details.

U.S. officials released intelligence last week that North Korea and Russia were arranging a meeting between their leaders that would take place within this month as they expand their cooperation in the face of deepening confrontations with the United States.

A possible venue for the meeting is the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, where Putin arrived Monday to attend an international forum that runs through Wednesday, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. The city was also the site of Putin’s first meeting with Kim in 2019. According to U.S. officials, Putin could focus on securing more supplies of North Korean artillery and other ammunition to refill declining reserves as he seeks to defuse a Ukrainian counteroffensive and show that he’s capable of grinding out a long war of attrition. That could potentially put more pressure on the United States and its partners to pursue negotiations as concerns over a protracted conflict grow despite their huge shipments of advanced weaponry to Ukraine in the past 17 months.

North Korea has possibly tens of millions of artillery shells and rockets based on Soviet designs that could potentially give a huge boost to the Russian army, analysts say.

In exchange, Kim could seek badly needed energy and food aid and advanced weapons technologies, including those related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines and military reconnaissance satellites, analysts say.

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There are concerns that potential Russian technology transfers would increase the threat posed by Kim’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles that are designed to target the U.S., South Korea, and Japan.

After a complicated, hot-and-cold relationship for decades, Russia and North Korea have been drawing closer since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The bond has been driven by Putin’s need for war help and Kim’s efforts to boost the visibility of his partnerships with traditional allies Moscow and Beijing as he tries to break out of diplomatic isolation and have North Korea be part of a united front against Washington.

While using the distraction caused by the Ukraine conflict to ramp up its weapons development, North Korea has repeatedly blamed Washington for the crisis in Ukraine, claiming the West’s “hegemonic policy” justified a Russian offensive in Ukraine to protect itself.

North Korea is the only nation besides Russia and Syria to recognize the independence of two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine — Donetsk and Luhansk -– and it has also hinted at an interest in sending construction workers to those areas to help with rebuilding efforts.

Russia -– along with China -– have blocked U.S.-led efforts at the U.N. Security Council to strengthen sanctions on North Korea over its intensifying missile tests while accusing Washington of worsening tensions with Pyongyang by expanding military exercises with South Korea and Japan.

The United States has been accusing North Korea since last year of providing Russia with arms, including artillery shells sold to the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Both Russian and North Korean officials denied such claims. But speculation about the countries’ military cooperation grew after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a rare visit to North Korea in July, when Kim invited him to an arms exhibition and a massive military parade in the capital where he showcased ICBMs designed to target the U.S. mainland.

Following that visit, Kim toured North Korea’s weapons factories, including a facility producing artillery systems where he urged workers to speed up the development and large-scale production of new kinds of ammunition. Experts say Kim’s visits to the factories likely had a dual goal of encouraging the modernization of North Korean weaponry and examining artillery and other supplies that could possibly be exported to Russia.

Jon Finer, U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief deputy national security adviser, told reporters Sunday that buying weapons from North Korea “may be the best and may be the only option” open to Moscow as it tries to keep its war effort going.

“We have serious concerns about the prospect of North Korea potentially selling weapons, additional weapons, to the Russian military. It is interesting to reflect for a minute on what it says that when Russia goes around the world looking for partners that can help it, it lands on North Korea,” Finer said aboard a plane carrying Biden from India to Vietnam.

Some analysts say a potential meeting between Kim and Putin would be more about symbolic gains than substantial military cooperation.

Russia, which has always closely guarded its most important weapons technologies, even from key allies such as China, could be unwilling to make major technology transfers with North Korea for what is likely to be limited war supplies transported over a small rail link between the countries, they say. ___

Associated Press journalists Jim Heintz in Tallinn, Estonia, and Dake Kang and Ng Han Guan in Fangchuan, China, contributed.

Estimates say the reclusive and isolated Asian country has tens of millions of artillery shells and rockets that could give a huge boost to the Russian army.

United States officials expect North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to visit Russia in the coming days to seal a possible deal on munitions transfer with President Vladimir Putin. That would be a remarkable reversal from the 1950-53 Korean War, when the Soviet Union provided the communist North with weapons and ammunition.

“We know that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has visited recently for artillery shells predominantly, and most likely that will be discussed between Putin and Kim Jong Un,” said Alexander Gabuev, head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

Shoigu became the first Russian defense chief to visit North Korea since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Images of him at a massive military parade in the capital of Pyongyang in July, alongside Kim and the medal-laden North Korean military brass, was a strong sign of a vigorous effort by Moscow to reach out to the North. Shoigu said joint military drills were possible.

Asked about a possible visit by Kim and a deal that would see North Korean arms supplies to Russia, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to comment.

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But he emphasized that Moscow cherishes ties with Pyongyang, adding: “North Korea is our neighbor, and we will further develop our relations without looking back at other countries’ opinion.”

Kim made his first visit to Russia in 2019 and held talks with Putin that included pledges of closer cooperation but weren’t followed by any visible breakthroughs.

While the bulk of the Korean People’s Army arsenals are dated, their enormous size would offer the Russian military a potential key lifeline amid Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II.

Hong Min, an analyst at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification, said Russia could seek to establish North Korea as a “rear base” for its war efforts, providing a massive flow of munitions.

“Russia is hoping that North Korea could swiftly establish support channels to provide it with war materials like ammunition, bombs and other supplies,” Hong said.

The U.S. said North Korea sold some munitions to Russia’s private military contractor, Wagner, in November. Both Russian and North Korean officials have denied that Pyongyang has shipped any weapons or munitions to Russia or intends to do so.

U.S. officials have cast Moscow’s reach for North Korean weapons as a reflection of Russian military problems. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the quality of North Korean weapons was an “open question.”

“It says a lot that Russia is having to turn to a country like North Korea to seek to bolster its defense capacity in a war that it expected be over in a week,” Sullivan said.

While Washington has warned Pyongyang against sending weapons to Russia, which would violate a United Nations embargo on any arms shipments to and from North Korea, observers say there is little the U.S. could do in response.

They note that Moscow could share advanced nuclear, missile and submarine technology with Pyongyang in exchange for arms supplies, a move that could embolden Kim and raise major threats to regional security.

“The United States and its allies have limited policy options in addressing this new challenge,” Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in an analysis.

While the North’s enormous stockpiles could boost the Russian war effort, Moscow has imported drones from another ally, Iran, that have played a significant role in the fighting.

Russia has used the Shahed exploding drones to strike Ukraine’s infrastructure for more than a year. After the initial surprise, Ukrainian air defenses have honed their skills in engaging them, but the cheap and simple drones that have a range exceeding 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) continue to inflict significant damage.

Russia reportedly has bought a production license from Iran and built its own factory to assemble the drones and churn out thousands of them a year. Iran is expected to initially provide the materials and technology, with the plant gradually shifting to domestically produced components.

Russian arms manufacturers have compensated for at least some of the equipment losses in the conflict and developed some new products, including satellite-guided gliding bombs and other precision weapons to fight back against Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive.

Early in the war, broad use of drones by Ukraine inflicted heavy losses on Russian forces and played a significant role in Moscow’s military setbacks. Russian officials acknowledged they hadn’t paid enough attention to drones before the war and vowed to fill the gap quickly.

One type of mass-produced exploding drone that made a visible impact is the Lancet, capable of lurking over the battlefield before hitting its target. Cheap and compact, it has become prolific, allowing the Russian military to strike Ukrainian tanks and artillery systems on a wide scale.

Russia has increasingly used another new asset in recent months: gliding aerial bombs. With a pair of winglets and a satellite navigation module, old Soviet-made bombs have been transformed into highly efficient “smart” weapons. They have a range of up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) and allow the Russian air force to step up attacks on Ukrainian forces along the front line without putting warplanes at risk.

Russia has adapted 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) bombs, using them to fend off the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It has worked to design a similar conversion for a 1,500-kilogram (3,300-pound) bomb, reportedly using it for the first time this month. Transformed into a gliding bomb, it is reportedly precise to 5 meters (16 feet) and leaves a 15-meter (50-foot) crater — a powerful weapon against Ukrainian military assets.

Another addition to the Russian arsenal is the Vikhr anti-tank missile used by Russian helicopter gunships. It has an extended range that allows pilots to take out Ukrainian armor while staying out of reach of air defenses and has seen wide use during the summer.

“The use of attack aviation has posed a consistent challenge for Ukrainian forces throughout the counteroffensive,” the Royal United Services Institute said in an analysis.

While developing new munitions, Russian manufacturers also bolstered production of tanks and other weapons, and the military has increasingly tapped its storage bases of thousands of armored vehicles dating to the Cold War. Some have been upgraded with protective shields and other equipment to increase their survivability.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, has said Russia will produce 1,500 battle tanks in 2023.

“Conveyer belts of our military industrial complex are working in three shifts, and it will produce as many weapons as needed to efficiently protect the Fatherland,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Emma Burrows in Tallinn, Estonia, and Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul contributed.

The strikes were among multiple Russian attacks across the country overnight, officials said. Meanwhile, Moscow is trying to strengthen its position politically with local elections in the four regions it illegally annexed last year, even though it doesn’t fully control any of the four. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it does not recognize the “fake elections.”

The strikes came days after 16 people were killed in a Russian attack on a market in eastern Ukraine and drone debris was found in Romania. That sparked fears among local residents that the war could spread into the NATO-member country bordering Ukraine.

Ten buildings were damaged in the attack on Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine on Friday. Nine policemen were among those wounded, according to Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s Interior Minister. Photos posted by Klymenko on Telegram showed a building on fire, burnt timbers and emergency services evacuating the wounded. By evening, the number of wounded rose to 73, according to the Interior Ministry.

Three people were also killed on Friday after a Russian bomb struck the village of Odradokamianka in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, Klymenko said.

Also on Friday, a funeral was held for an 18-year-old who was among 16 people killed Wednesday in a Russian attack on a market in Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The attack, which also wounded 33, turned the market into a fiery, blackened ruin and overshadowed a two-day visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken aimed at assessing Ukraine’s three-month-old counteroffensive.

Blinken’s visit signaled ongoing U.S. support with the announcement of an additional $1 billion in aid to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia is holding local elections in the part of the Kherson region it controls. Local elections are also being held in the Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Voting for federal and local legislators is also underway in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

In Kherson, local residents and Ukrainian activists say election poll workers have made house calls accompanied by armed soldiers.

Ukraine has dismissed the elections, calling on its allies to condemn Russia’s actions and urging them not to recognize any administration created as a result of the votes.

The war continued to raise difficult questions for other nations trying to manage the war’s fallout on food security, inflation and other matters.

Britain announced Friday it will host a global food security summit in November in response to Russia’s withdrawal from a Black Sea grain deal and attacks on Ukraine’s grain supply.

The announcement came as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrived in India for a Group of 20 summit, where he hopes to marshal international resources to counteract the war’s impact on the global food supply.

Sunak’s government said Royal Air Force aircraft will fly over the Black Sea as part of efforts to deter Russia from striking cargo ships transporting grain from Ukraine.

“We will use our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to monitor Russian activity in the Black Sea, call out Russia if we see warning signs that they are preparing attacks on civilian shipping or infrastructure in the Black Sea, and attribute attacks to prevent false-flag claims that seek to deflect blame from Russia,” the U.K. government said.

Former British prime minister Boris Johnson in the meantime visited Ukraine on Friday and attended the Yalta European Strategy forum. In a video posted in Zelenskyy’s Telegram channel, Johnson was seen listening to the Ukraine leader’s speech along with Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, who now leads an international working group on sanctions against Moscow together with Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak.

Zelenskyy in his speech said that “for many in the world, Ukraine is not just a country in Europe that is defending itself against Russian aggression” — it is “now a personal moral choice” and a symbol of ”a standard of freedom in which people from different countries recognise their own standards.”

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Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine