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Tag: russia

  • She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

    She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her


    Ms. Petrova’s return flight from Paris landed in Boston on the evening of Feb. 16. As the plane sat on the tarmac, she texted back and forth with Dr. Peshkin, trying to confirm how she should handle the package in customs. But by then, the passengers were already filing off the plane, he said, and Ms. Petrova cut short the conversation.

    At first, Ms. Petrova said, her re-entry felt normal. At passport control, an officer examined the J-1 visa that Harvard had sponsored, identifying her as a biomedical researcher. The officer stamped her passport, admitting her to the country.

    Then, as she headed toward the baggage claim, a Border Patrol officer approached her and asked to search her suitcase. All she could think was that the embryo samples inside would be ruined; RNA degrades easily. She explained that she didn’t know the rules. The officer was polite, she recalled, and told her she would be allowed to leave.

    Then a different officer came into the room, and the tone of the conversation changed, Ms. Petrova said. This officer asked detailed questions about the samples, Ms. Petrova’s work history and her travel in Europe. The official then informed Ms. Petrova that she was canceling her visa and asked her whether she was afraid to be deported to Russia.

    “Yes, I am scared to go back to Russia,” she said, according to a Department of Homeland Security transcript provided by her lawyer. “I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them.”

    Ms. Petrova’s attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said that Customs and Border Protection had overreached its authority by canceling her visa. He acknowledged that she had violated customs regulations but said it was a minor offense, punishable by forfeiture and a fine.

    To cancel her visa, Mr. Romanovsky said, the agents needed to identify grounds for excluding her. “There are many, many grounds of inadmissibility, but violating a customs rule is certainly not one of them,” he said.

    Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School, reviewed documents in the case and agreed. He said that Ms. Petrova had been legally admitted to the United States, and then “the government itself created the alleged improper immigration status that is now the basis for her detention.”

    “Subjecting anyone to this process is wrong, and this case is both shocking and revealing,” said Mr. Guttentag, who served as a senior Justice Department advisor under President Biden and senior advisor to the D.H.S. during the Obama administration.

    In February, customs officials detained Ms. Petrova at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos.Credit…M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times

    A spokesperson for the D.H.S., asked why Ms. Petrova’s visa had been canceled, said that a canine inspection found petri dishes and vials of embryonic stem cells in her luggage without proper permits.

    “The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying biological substances into the country,” the spokesperson said. “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”

    When the border patrol agent canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa, she became an undocumented immigrant, among the thousands detained since Mr. Trump took office. She was sent to the Richwood Detention Center to await a hearing in which she will present her case for asylum to an immigration judge.

    “If she wins, she will not be deported,” Mr. Romanovsky said. “If she loses, she will be deported to Russia.”

    He has also filed a petition for her release in federal court, and pressed ICE to release her on parole. “I am basically pleading for mercy,” he said. “In a different environment, I think she would have been out a long time ago.”

    Ms. Petrova has spent the last month in a dormitory lined with rows of bunk beds. It is cold, and at night, the women sometimes shiver under thin blankets. Once a day, they are allowed an hour outside. Breakfast comes at different times, sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. The hardest thing, she said, is the constant noise. The facility’s psychiatrist gave her earplugs to help her sleep.

    Unable to work, she observes the women around her. Around half are Latin Americans in their 30s and 40s who crossed the border for economic reasons, she said. A second group is made up of Asians and citizens of former Soviet states, who crossed the border legally, seeking political asylum.

    None of them deserve to be held under these conditions, she said. “I thought this was impossible, to be in this situation,” she said. “Even immigrants here, they have to have some rights. But it seems that nobody really cares about our rights here.”

    It has challenged the view of America that she formed in Russia. “This is not the kind of America I used to know,” she said.



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  • A U.S. Investor Helped Build Russia’s Economy. He Was Jailed on Bogus Charges.

    A U.S. Investor Helped Build Russia’s Economy. He Was Jailed on Bogus Charges.


    A foul cell in a Moscow detention center was about the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey expected to find himself after spending 25 years building a flourishing venture capital firm in Russia that transformed some tech startups into global brands.

    First, beefy agents from the F.S.B., the federal security service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. Hours later he was confined to a holding cell with two other inmates and a filthy hole in the floor for a toilet.

    “The cell is stuffy and hot, an oppressive stench hanging in the air as if from accumulated decades of human sweat mixed with the indescribable horrors emanating from the toilet hole area,” Mr. Calvey wrote in a new book out this week called “Odyssey Moscow.” It details his extended ordeal through the Russian court system in a fabricated fraud case initiated in 2019: “In the course of a few surreal, terrifying hours I have morphed from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.”

    With President Trump lauding the possibility of “major economic development transactions” between the United States and Russia as he seeks improved relations with Moscow, Mr. Calvey’s fate stands as a cautionary tale about the significant personal and professional risks involved in doing business in Russia, particularly given the arbitrary nature of its courts.

    Perhaps no Western businessman promoted foreign investment in Russia more than Mr. Calvey, 57, who helped to forge internet titans from tech startups like Yandex — a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one — or Tinkoff Credit Systems, one of the world’s biggest digital banks. The firm he founded, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, earned colossal returns.

    Then Baring Vostok got mired in a nasty commercial dispute with two dubious Russian partners who were stripping assets out of a bank in a troubled merger. Once, Mr. Calvey’s empty Moscow apartment mysteriously caught fire hours before a dinner involving tense negotiations.

    After his firm filed a case with a London arbitration court, the partners convinced Department K of the F.S.B., responsible for internal financial crimes, that the American and several partners had perpetuated a massive fraud as part of a dastardly foreign plot to undermine Russia’s financial sector.

    The agents pounced in February 2019, and although no evidence of wrongdoing ever emerged in court, Mr. Calvey and several partners spent years in jail or under house arrest.

    “Once the F.S.B. gets involved in a case, they’re like a car with six gears going forward and none in reverse,” Mr. Calvey said in an interview in Switzerland, his home since finally being allowed to leave Russia in 2022. Lanky and trim, he retains a boyish air despite his gray hair. “They will never back up or lose face.”

    His arrest stunned Western investors. “Everyone I knew was incredulous, angry and shocked,” said Bernie Sucher, an American banker with extended experience in Russia. “It was viewed as a direct assault on the very idea of long-term investment in the Russian economy.”

    Unusually, dozens of influential Russians defended Mr. Calvey. They included Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and now a key negotiator for ending the Ukraine war; German Gref, the chief executive of Russia’s largest bank; and Alexei Kudrin, a previous finance minister. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also objected strenuously to his arrest.

    Mr. Calvey thought such interventions, combined with the blow to investor confidence, would get the case dropped. But nothing outweighed the F.S.B.

    President Vladimir V. Putin did summon top Kremlin officials, ordering them to get the American businessman out of prison, but also to find something illegal that Mr. Calvey had done, he said he later learned. At a tense time in U.S.-Russia relations, the Kremlin could not admit to arresting a prominent American businessman on false pretenses, he said.

    Released from prison after two months, Mr. Calvey was confined to his apartment with an electronic monitoring device strapped around his ankle for two years, and spent a third under court-ordered supervision with an 8 p.m. curfew. When he developed a cancerous tumor in one leg, the court refused to allow him to remove the device, so doctors operated without benefit of an M.R.I.

    The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Calvey’s account. At the time of his conviction, Dmitry Peskov, the presidential spokesman, quoted Mr. Putin as saying that the government could not interfere in the courts.

    When first arrested, Mr. Calvey was jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina prison, near downtown Moscow. It is sometimes called “Kremlin Central” because so many inmates face charges in high-profile corruption cases pushed by the Kremlin. There were no violent criminals, but nobody is ever acquitted, either, Mr. Calvey wrote.

    His cellmates greeted him with a nonalcoholic toast: “Novoselye,” or welcome. One was a former deputy minister of culture. Another was an army general. A younger one was a computer hacker, and three were construction moguls. Trust nobody, one of them confided.

    Their cell, 13 feet by 16 feet, was tidy and somewhat comfortable, with a television and a separate toilet. The men shared everything equally from cleaning chores to food supplies from outside. He dedicated his book to the men of Cell 604, and tears up when he talks about them. The book will be released Thursday in Britain and in April in the United States.

    Throughout his detention, Mr. Calvey endeavored to avoid his jailers seeing him disturbed. His reading list included Kafka as an apt reflection of his fate.

    When one prosecutor summarized the case, for example, she admitted that not a single witness testified to a crime being committed, then added, “That just proves what a well-organized criminal group we are dealing with.” The entire courtroom laughed aloud, Mr. Calvey said.

    The trial underscored F.S.B. control over the courts, with the closing statements repeating the opening accusations almost exactly, Mr. Calvey said. All the witness testimony might never have happened. “Russian people are of course the main victims of its courts,” he wrote.

    In August 2021, Mr. Calvey was convicted of the misappropriation of funds and given a five-year suspended sentence. The conviction on false charges grated, he said, a stain on all his work for Russia.

    His Russia saga started in 1991, when just two years out of the University of Oklahoma, Mr. Calvey went to work for his former Wall Street boss at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It was established to help the former Soviet bloc transition to a market economy.

    He worked on financing energy sector projects. Considered young for the magnitude of the deals, he tried to camouflage his age by adopting a serious demeanor at work, said Charlie Ryan, his first Moscow roommate.

    “Life for an expat in 1990s Moscow was equal parts bizarre and marvelous,” Mr. Calvey wrote. Pizza Hut was considered a high-end restaurant to impress a date. Kilos of inexpensive caviar proved a substitute for breakfast cereal.

    Mr. Calvey established Baring Vostok to build businesses catering to the new middle class. He married a Russian woman named Julia, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, now all young adults.

    He existed within an elite business bubble, surrounded by people eager to integrate Russia into the global economy. At the time of his trial, Baring Vostok said that overall, it had invested more than $2.8 billion in 80 companies across the region, making it the biggest such Western player.

    He learned Russian through countless hours he spent with young, ambitious entrepreneurs. “It was hard to spend time with them and not feel like Russia was a much, much better place than at the time of their grandparent’s generation,” he said.

    When prominent businessmen got arrested, Mr. Calvey attributed it to their meddling in politics. He considered his Russian associates overly gloomy about the direction of their country.

    He ignored repeated red flags that Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent, had handed control over every major institution to the siloviki, a Russian term incorporating all security agencies. Not even the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 deterred Mr. Calvey.

    “What I didn’t really appreciate, and only realized with my arrest, was the depth of the control and influence of the ruling caste of Russia, which is F.S.B. and the other siloviki,” he said.

    Mr. Calvey’s businesses thrived even while he was imprisoned, and he pulled the plug only after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The hasty disinvestment cost his company billions of dollars, he said.

    He is done with Russia. Although under Russian law his conviction was nullified after his five-year probation period ended a year ago, last week a Moscow court changed the probationary sentence given to a French defendant in the case to a prison term in absentia.

    Mr. Calvey expects some American businesses to return, although he considers Russia too risky for long-term investments. A peace deal might prompt him to invest in Ukraine, however. He is fostering internet startups elsewhere, employing young tech talent that fled Russia.

    The simmering geopolitical differences between Moscow and Washington mean that any businessman can become a chessboard pawn, he said, adding: “You may hope that you’re not going to get stepped on the head, but ultimately it could happen at any time.”



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  • Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93

    Sofia Gubaidulina, Composer Who Provoked Soviet Censors, Dies at 93


    Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93.

    Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. Gubaidulina’s publisher, said the cause was cancer.

    Ms. Gubaidulina (pronounced goo-bye-DOO-lee-na) wrote many works steeped in biblical and liturgical texts that provoked censors at home and, beginning in the final decade of the Cold War, captivated Western audiences. She was part of a group of important composers in the Soviet Union, including Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, who found disfavor with the authorities but acclaim abroad.

    She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between man and God. Using musical terms, Ms. Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented “staccato of life.”

    Soloists who performed her work, among them the violinists Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sofie Mutter, often spoke of the emotional intensity that the music required. Conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, were strong advocates for her music.

    Folk traditions also fascinated Ms. Gubaidulina, who credited her Tatar roots with her love for percussion and shimmering sound colors. She favored soft-spoken or tenebrous instruments including the harp, the 13-stringed Japanese koto and the double bass.

    She collected instruments from different cultures and founded a collective of performers, which she named Astreia, that improvised on them. Later, she developed an interest in Japanese music and wrote compositions that utilized both Western and Japanese instruments.

    Ms. Gubaidulina had a special affinity with the bayan, a Russian button accordion normally more at home at folk weddings than in the concert hall. As a 5-year-old, she fell under the spell of an itinerant accordionist in her impoverished neighborhood of Kazan, the capital of what was then the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her improvised dances to his music drew the attention of a neighbor and landed her a spot in a school for musically gifted children.

    Years later, she wrote concert works — including “De Profundis” and “Seven Words” — with parts for the bayan that expanded its sound palette, ranging from wheezing death rattles to blindingly bright filaments of sound. She exploited the expressive potential hidden in between notes in the pulmonary action of the instrument’s bellows.

    “Do you know why I love this monster so much?” she once asked, referring to the bayan. “Because it breathes.”

    Audiences responded. Performances of “De Profundis” often reduced them to tears, the bayan player Elsbeth Moser said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.

    Ms. Gubaidulina looked to natural laws to establish form in her compositions. She drew on the mathematical Fibonacci series (in which the first two numbers are 0 and 1 and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two) to determine the proportions of a work’s component movements. She experimented with alternate tuning systems rooted in the natural overtone series and considered the Western convention of dividing an octave into 12 equal steps a violation of nature. Sometimes she had groups of instruments tuned a quarter tone apart, in order to evoke a spiritual dimension hovering just out of reach.

    To Soviet critics, her microchromatic tunings were “irresponsible” and Astreia’s improvisations a form of “hooliganism.” The dark sound palette and mystical spaciousness of her music ran counter to the tuneful optimism favored by Soviet officials. In 1979, Tikhon Khrennikov, the head of the powerful Composer’s Union, added Ms. Gubaidulina to a blacklist.

    Until the 1980s, Ms. Gubaidulina witnessed few performances of her own music. She earned money writing scores for films and cartoons. She was repeatedly denied permission to travel to festivals in Poland and in the West.

    The watchful eye of the K.G.B. followed her. After her home was searched in 1974, she took to speaking in a near-whisper to foreign visitors. Around the same time, she was assaulted in the elevator of her building in Moscow.

    “He grabbed my throat and slowly squeezed it,” Ms. Gubaidulina later recalled of her assailant. “My thoughts were racing: It’s all over now — too bad I can’t write my bassoon concerto anymore — I’m not afraid of death but of violence. Then I told him: ‘Why so slowly?’” The attacker relented. At the police station, officers shrugged off the attack as the work of a “sex maniac.”

    Sofia Gubaidulina was born on Oct. 24, 1931, in the Tatar city of Chistopol. Her father, Asgad Gubaidullin, was a Tatar geodetic engineer and the son of an imam. Her mother, Fedosia Fyodorovna Elkhova, a teacher, was Russian.

    At home, Sofia and her two sisters learned to play children’s pieces on a baby grand piano that took up much of the family’s living space. The girls also experimented with placing objects on the piano’s strings to draw odd sounds from it, a world away from the United States, where John Cage was then writing his first sonata for prepared piano, which involved inserting an assortment of items like metal bolts and rubber erasers between the instrument’s strings to alter the sound.

    The sight of a Russian Orthodox icon in a farmhouse had sparked Sofia’s interest in religion, but in order not to endanger her family, she learned to internalize her spiritual side and blend it with music. Silence unfolded its own magic, especially on surveying trips with her father, when the two walked wordlessly along streams and through forests.

    Ms. Gubaidulina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory before enrolling at the Moscow Conservatory in 1954. Her teachers included Yuri Shaporin and Nikolai Peiko, an assistant of Shostakovich. In 1959, Peiko introduced his student to Shostakovich. After hearing Ms. Gubaidulina’s music, Shostakovich told her: “Don’t be afraid to be yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect way.”

    Ms. Gubaidulina married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, in 1956. They collaborated on a song cycle, “Phacelia,” and had a daughter, Nadezhda, who died of cancer in 2004. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to the dissident poet and samizdat publisher Nikolai Bokov. In the 1990s, Ms. Gubaidulina married Pyotr Meshchaninov, a conductor and music theorist, who died in 2006. She is survived by two grandchildren.

    Ms. Gubaidulina’s breakthrough came with her first violin concerto, “Offertorium,” completed in 1980, a work of grave beauty that ingeniously disassembles and rebuilds the “Royal Theme” upon which Bach based his “Musical Offering.”

    The work’s Christian underpinnings were a thorn in the side of Soviet censors. It didn’t help that the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, for whom she had written it, incensed officials by overstaying an approved trip to the West.

    In the end, her West German publisher, Jürgen Köchel of Sikorski Editions, smuggled the score out and “Offertorium” received its premiere at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria in 1981. An orchestral work, “Stimmen … verstummen” (“Voices … fall silent”) made it to a festival in West Berlin only because the West German Embassy in Moscow had sent the score out by diplomatic pouch.

    “Offertorium” was also the introduction to Ms. Gubaidulina’s music for many American listeners when the New York Philharmonic programmed it, with Mr. Kremer as soloist, in 1985. Around this time, she began to receive permission to travel and visited festivals in Finland and Germany.

    In 1992, Ms. Gubaidulina moved to Germany and settled in the village of Appen, outside of Hamburg. Commissions began to roll in, including an invitation from the International Bach Academy Stuttgart to write her own version of “St. John Passion” for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death.

    That 90-minute work, almost entirely built out of the diminished minor interval, sounds like a musical sigh. A reviewer called it “claustrophobic and doom-laden.” Many critics also found the length of some of Ms. Gubaidulina’s works excessive.

    The conductor Joel Sachs, who invited her to visit New York in 1989, remembered being struck particularly by one of her works performed there, “Perception,” a 50-minute piece for soprano, baritone and strings that dramatizes a dialogue about art and creation using texts by the Austrian-born poet Francisco Tanzer. As in much of Ms. Gubaidulina’s work, some of the argument is played out in purely instrumental moments.

    “It really is dramatic in the way we assume a Western cantata to be,” Mr. Sachs said, “but the sounds she generates are almost more important than the actual notes.”



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  • Russia Is Wooing Western Energy Companies, but Will They Return?

    Russia Is Wooing Western Energy Companies, but Will They Return?


    Kremlin officials are dangling the prospect of lucrative investment deals for American energy companies, apparently seeking to convince President Trump that large economic gains could come from siding with Moscow in ending the war in Ukraine and scrapping economic sanctions on Russia.

    There is no doubt that Russia has vast troves of oil and natural gas, but an effort to lure American or other Western energy companies to undertake Russian projects is likely to encounter skepticism, not least because of the companies’ recent history in Russia.

    Nevertheless, Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin financial official, expressed optimism last week about the prospect, pitching the potential for investment opportunities by Western companies, including oil producers.

    Energy companies would need to weigh access to troves of oil and natural gas against potential pitfalls, including reputational damage from taking part in an industry that has financially sustained a government waging war against its neighbor.

    “Russia has enormous resources and scale always matters” to large energy companies, said Ben Cahill, an energy analyst at the University of Texas at Austin. “But aboveground risk is the killer,” he added, using industry parlance for political and legal problems.

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago, Western energy giants including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell spent years carving out a role for themselves in the Russian oil industry.

    But when Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022, all of these companies felt compelled to either put their businesses on ice or walk away, leading to billions of dollars in write-offs. During their involvement in Russia, companies including BP, the London energy giant, encountered raids on their offices and other harassment.

    “How many of those would tell you that they had a happy experience?” asked Thane Gustafson, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has written several books on the Russian energy industry.

    Still, there appear to be potential routes for oil companies to go back to Russia. Exxon Mobil, for instance, gave up its role in a valuable oil project that it had operated on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East for 20 years, leaving its stake in limbo. “There is a potential for return,” said John Gawthorp, an analyst at Argus Media, a London research firm.

    Exxon Mobil was also considered to have a relatively good relationship with its Russian partner Rosneft, the state-controlled oil company. And it had envisioned participating in other ventures, including work in the Arctic, where it drilled a decade ago, and shale drilling. Those activities were blocked by sanctions following Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014.

    Exxon Mobil declined to comment on resuming work in Russia. It has written off $4.6 billion on the Sakhalin project, saying in a 2023 regulatory filing that management deemed the “carrying value” of the asset not recoverable.

    Any return of Western companies to Russia is likely to require an end to the Ukraine conflict, and the removal of extensive sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union on Russian oil and gas-related activities and entities. Analysts say it may become easier for American companies to return than for their European counterparts because Washington seems more inclined than Brussels to lift restrictions.

    The energy giants, whose projects take years to complete, would also need to be convinced that they would not wind up facing new restrictions in a few years in the event of a change of government in the United States or renewed aggression by Russia.

    “It would be very surprising to me if any U.S. company were to make a big investment in Russia,” said Edward Fishman, a former State Department senior official for sanctions on Iran and the author of a coming book on sanctions called “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.”

    Taking the wraps off the Russian industry may also not be in the interests of parts of the American energy industry. For instance, lifting U.S. curbs imposed by the Biden administration targeting exports of Russian liquefied natural gas is likely to create more competition for L.N.G. from the United States, which has replaced Russian gas in Europe during the last three years. “Russian L.N.G. on the global market is a direct competitor to U.S. L.N.G.,” said James Waddell, a gas analyst at Energy Aspects, a research firm. “This is not something that the U.S. administration would be willing to give away readily.”

    Analysts also say the energy industry has changed since the early part of this century. The U.S. shale boom has given companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron alternatives to potentially riskier international plays.

    “The U.S. majors have far more attractive opportunities elsewhere in the world,” including the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and Guyana, said Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Why should they choose Russia, with its high political risks?”

    Analysts say that energy companies may also no longer see the potential bonanza in Russia that was there after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    At that time, the application of Western technology to Russia’s huge resources greatly enhanced Russia’s output. That feat is unlikely to be repeated. Companies would probably not tell their shareholders that they “are rushing back in to seize a generational opportunity,” said Peter McNally, global head of sector analysts at Third Bridge, a New York research firm.

    During the three years of sanctions, Russia has developed its own technologies and obtained support from China and India, now the main customers for its oil. “For me, it’s a question mark whether U.S. companies would be welcomed back as equal partners,” Ms. Mitrova said.

    The Russian oil industry and government have always been ambivalent about sharing wealth with foreign investors. BP assembled a successful Russian oil company in the early part of this century but was subject to harassment including raids on its premises by armed security personnel. Bob Dudley, the chief of the local company, who later became chief executive of BP, was forced to flee Russia.

    In 2013, BP managed to swap its Russian holdings for a package including a nearly 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the largest Russian oil company, After the invasion of Ukraine, BP gave up its two seats on the company’s board, stopped reporting its Russian earnings, and took a $24.4 billion charge. Dividends from the shareholding are being paid into restricted Russian bank accounts to which BP does not have access.

    Earlier this month, Murray Auchincloss, BP’s current chief executive, brushed off an analyst’s question about reverting to a more normal approach to the Russian holding, noting that Rosneft remained under sanctions by more than a dozen countries. “Our principal focus now is on divesting the stake,” he said.

    Of all large Western energy companies, TotalEnergies of France seems best placed to return to business as normal in Russia, if the political situation permits. The company wrote off $14.8 billion on its Russian business in 2022, but it has continued to import liquefied natural gas from a facility called Yamal that it helped develop in the Russian Arctic with Novatek, a Russian gas company in which the French company owns a 19 percent stake. TotalEnergies declined to comment, but it has said that these shipments contribute to Europe’s energy security.

    Analysts say returning may be easier for smaller Western companies that provide services like hydraulic fracturing and other technical support. SLB, the former Schlumberger, is one of the largest such companies and continues to work in Russia, saying it is in compliance with sanctions.

    These companies “trained large numbers of Russian oil workers, who are the backbone of the industry today, now that the Westerners have mostly departed,” Mr. Gustafson wrote in his coming book, “Perfect Storm.”

    Rebecca F. Elliott contributed reporting.



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  • A Goth Band’s Journey From Screams to Whispers

    A Goth Band’s Journey From Screams to Whispers


    When IC3PEAK released its last album, “Kiss of Death,” the record had all the characteristics that had made the band into a boogeyman in Russia and led authorities to try and shut down its shows: death-obsessed lyrics, anti-state provocations and bloodcurdling screams.

    But on the Russian duo’s new album, “Coming Home,” released Friday, the vibe has drastically changed. The harsh electro and heavy metal sounds are largely gone. Instead the band’s vocalist, Nastya Kreslina, gently coos and whispers over melodic indie rock.

    Kreslina said that there was a simple explanation for the shift: “Everything in our lives has changed.”

    Three years ago, Kreslina left Moscow just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ever since, Kreslina and her bandmate, Nikolay Kostylev, have been coping with the emotional and creative fallout of the conflict.

    Kreslina said she used to scream so that Russian listeners would notice her. Now, she said, a quiet voice felt like the only way to get “noticed among all the screaming.”

    Since leaving Russia, Kreslina has wandered between Paris, Los Angeles, Istanbul and Turin, Italy, among other cities; Kostylev now lives in Berlin. Kreslina has an apartment in Riga, Latvia, but she said it didn’t feel like a permanent address. Since leaving Russia, she said, she still hadn’t found a place that “gave a feeling of home.”

    Exiled Russian musicians often struggle to rebuild their careers abroad. Distanced from their domestic fan base and, in some cases, designated traitors by their government, many wind up playing small concerts to other émigrés.

    This is particularly true of mainstream pop acts, but some alternative groups, like IC3PEAK and the deathcore band Slaughter to Prevail, have maintained or even grown in popularity from abroad, even as Russia’s cultural cachet has nose-dived.

    Kostylev said that, based on streaming data, he estimated that about 70 percent of IC3PEAK’s fans live outside Russia, so going into exile had not had a significant financial impact. “In a way we’re lucky,” he said: “We can have personal crises, because we have food on the table.”

    The band’s distinctive look was a key part of its international appeal, said Michael Idov, a former editor-in-chief of GQ Russia who lives in the United States. The band wears all-black with white face paint and its videos often look like horror movies, with zombies and monsters. Idov said those images appealed to social media users searching out unusual acts online, as well as music fans. “They’ve always felt ripe for crossover,” he said.

    During a joint interview with Kreslina in a restaurant on Riga’s outskirts, Kostylev said the duo intended to maintain its bold fashion sense, even as it pivots to gentler music. For the “Coming Home” album campaign, the duo dress as Goth angels in tracksuits.

    Formed in 2013, when Kreslina and Kostylev were at college in Moscow, IC3PEAK had run-ins with Russian authorities from its early days. In 2018, it released “Death No More” a track whose video features the band members setting themselves alight in front of a government building in Moscow while Kreslina sings “All Russia is watching me / Let it all burn.”

    Around that time, Kostylev said, police officers and security service agents tried to shut down many IC3PEAK shows. He and Kreslina were detained and spied on, Kostylev added. (The F.S.B. did not respond to a request for comment.)

    At first, the pair found the attention “fun,” Kostylev said, and every performance felt “like showing the middle finger” to the authorities. But over time, paranoia grew, and Kostylev left Russia before the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine began because he had found the atmosphere stifling.

    Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founder of the art collective Pussy Riot, who also had trouble with the Russian authorities and now also lives in exile, said she had first seen IC3PEAK in Moscow around 2018, at a gig with “thousands of teenage girls dancing and screaming along.”

    IC3PEAK was important as “one of the first artists” in Russia to speak openly about state repression, Tolokonnikova added. “They’re more than a band,” she said: “They build a world.”

    “Coming Home” doesn’t feature any openly political tracks, though there are subtle allusions to the war in Ukraine and the experience of exile. On “Where is My Home?,” for instance, Kreslina said she was singing from the perspective of a soldier returning from a foreign battlefield to find that their country had changed. “There is my home / But where is my home?” she sings.

    Both Kreslina and Kostylev said they wanted to reach a Russian audience with the new album, as well as listeners in the West. They had agonized for months over whether to pull their music from streaming services in Russia, Kreslina added, but decided not to so they could maintain a connection with fans there who oppose the government.

    What long-term IC3PEAK enthusiasts will make of the band’s new direction, Kostylev seemed unsure. “A lot of fans will find it confusing,” he said, “but we can’t do anything about that. We’re just doing what we feel.”



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  • Trump Treasury Pick Scott Bessent to Face Grilling

    Trump Treasury Pick Scott Bessent to Face Grilling


    Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, will face questions from lawmakers on Thursday about how he would manage a department at the center of the Trump administration’s tax, trade and sanctions policies, along with handling the nation’s debt load.

    Mr. Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager with deep experience in financial markets, has been meeting with Senate Republicans and Democrats in recent weeks and is expected to have a relatively smooth confirmation process.

    A former top investor for the liberal philanthropist George Soros, Mr. Bessent has given large sums to Democrats and Republicans over the years.

    “I firmly believe that, if confirmed, and with your counsel and support, we can usher in a new, more balanced era of prosperity that will lift up all Americans and rebuild communities and families across the country,” Mr. Bessent will say, according to a copy of his prepared remarks that was reviewed by The New York Times.

    But several of the lawmakers he will appear before on Thursday during his confirmation hearing disagree with him on economic policy. Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee are expected to press Mr. Bessent on Mr. Trump’s plans to enact universal tariffs, potentially ease sanctions on Russia, establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and cut taxes for the rich.

    “Bessent has spent his life helping the rich get richer,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who met with him recently, said in an interview. Ms. Warren, who sits on the Finance Committee, also described him as “smart and thoughtful.”

    Here’s what to watch at the hearing.

    The Treasury Department will be crucial to Mr. Trump’s plans to rewrite the tax code and extend the 2017 tax cuts that Republicans passed and Mr. Trump signed into law.

    Mr. Bessent will warn in his remarks that failing to extend the tax cuts would represent “the largest tax increase in history.”

    Extending that law is expected to cost $4 trillion over a decade. Mr. Trump has proposed other tax cuts — including eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits — that are likely to be paid for with borrowed money. As the person in charge of the department that issues and sells government debt to investors, Mr. Bessent would have to figure out how to ensure investors will buy more Treasury securities when the national debt already exceeds $36 trillion.

    In the fiscal year 2024, the federal budget deficit was $1.8 trillion, or 6.4 percent of gross domestic product. Mr. Bessent has said that he wants to get that down to 3 percent of G.D.P. by 2028, but it is unclear how the new administration would make that happen.

    At an event last year hosted by the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, Mr. Bessent said that the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts should be covered by other budget cuts, such as gutting provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. He also suggested freezing nondefense “discretionary” spending and shifting some Medicaid spending to states.

    When Mr. Trump was looking for a Treasury secretary, it was important for him to find someone who would defend tariffs.

    The president-elect wants to impose blanket tariffs on imports and enact stiff import duties on goods from China. As Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent would wield the prospect of tariffs in economic talks with his Chinese counterparts while trying to calm markets and mitigate the impact of a trade war that could slow the global economy.

    While Democrats also support tariffs as a way to protect American jobs and industries, Mr. Trump’s plans go far beyond that. The president has said he will use tariffs to exact concessions such as reducing illegal border crossings from Mexico and acquiring Greenland.

    Mr. Bessent has said that it would be prudent if any tariffs were phased in so that any associated “price adjustment” could be absorbed gradually by the economy.

    One of the biggest changes that the Trump administration could herald is full embrace of cryptocurrencies. While Mr. Trump was a skeptic of cryptocurrencies in his first term, he became a proponent of digital assets such as Bitcoin during his presidential campaign as the technology became a major source of donations.

    Cryptocurrency lobbyists are pushing the new Trump administration to ease regulations on the industry, and Mr. Trump has been considering creating a “strategic reserve” of Bitcoin similar to federal stockpiles of gold and oil.

    As Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent would be responsible for ensuring that cryptocurrencies did not become more of a magnet for scams, money laundering and sanctions evasion.

    Mr. Bessent’s recently released financial disclosure revealed that had as much as $500,000 in a Bitcoin investment fund. If confirmed, Mr. Bessent said that he would divest that investment.

    Most incoming Treasury secretaries have little experience in national security and, as stewards of the nation’s sanctions program, must quickly get up to speed.

    That goes for Mr. Bessent, who will be overseeing a sanctions program that has rapidly expanded in recent years as the United States has increasingly relied on financial warfare rather than direct military conflict.

    Mr. Bessent will say in his remarks that the nation must “carefully deploy sanctions as part of a whole-of-government approach.”

    Mr. Trump said last year that he had concerns that an overuse of sanctions could lead to the demise of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The excessive use of sanctions, he believes, could cause other countries to turn to other currencies such as China’s renminbi so that they can make transactions that are beyond the reach of the United States.

    Mr. Bessent will likely face questions from Democrats and Republicans about the raft of sanctions that the Biden administration has imposed on Russia as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine. President Biden has expanded those sanctions in recent days as his administration tries to create a bulwark against Mr. Trump, who has a more amicable relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

    Mr. Trump has suggested that he prefers tariffs over sanctions, and lawmakers will likely press Mr. Bessent about whether he would encourage the president-elect to keep existing sanctions in place.

    Democrats are also set to question Mr. Bessent’s own tax practices. Democratic staff members of the Finance Committee reviewed three years of Mr. Bessent’s tax returns as part of the vetting process.

    In a memo viewed by The Times, the staff members wrote that Mr. Bessent had collected earnings from his hedge fund in a way that allowed him to avoid paying more than $900,000 in payroll taxes.

    The I.R.S., an agency in the Treasury Department, has in recent years sought to clamp down on the ability of hedge fund managers to avoid payroll taxes the way Mr. Bessent did. The Democratic staff members wrote in the memo that “Mr. Bessent’s position is counter to the position of the department he hopes to lead.”

    The memo, a preview of some of the questions Mr. Bessent will face from Democrats, also highlights other ways he reduced his tax bill, including by writing off losses from a publisher he co-owned.

    A spokeswoman for Mr. Bessent did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.



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  • Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread

    Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread


    The Biden administration issued sweeping rules on Monday governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an attempt to set up a global framework that will guide how artificial intelligence spreads around the world in the years to come.

    With the power of A.I. rapidly growing, the Biden administration said the rules were necessary to keep a transformational technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries that could use it to augment their militaries, carry out cyberattacks and otherwise threaten the United States.

    Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.

    The rules put various limitations on the number of A.I. chips that companies can send to different countries, essentially dividing the world into three categories. The United States and 18 of its closest partners — including Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — are exempted from any restrictions and can buy A.I. chips freely.

    Countries that are already subject to U.S. arms embargoes, like China and Russia, will continue to face a previously existing ban on A.I. chip purchases.

    All other nations — most of the world — will be subject to caps restricting the number of A.I. chips that can be imported, though countries and companies are able to increase that number by entering into special agreements with the U.S. government. The rules could rankle some foreign governments: Even countries that are close trading partners or military allies of the United States, such as Mexico, Switzerland, Poland or Israel, will face restrictions on their ability to purchase larger amounts of American A.I. products.

    In a statement, the European Commission said on Monday that it had shared its concerns about the measures with the Biden administration.

    “We are concerned about the U.S. measures adopted today restricting access to advanced A.I. chip exports for selected E.U. member states and their companies,” the commission said, adding that European countries are “an economic opportunity for the U.S., not a security risk.”

    The rules are aimed at stopping China from obtaining from other countries the technology it needs to produce artificial intelligence, after the United States banned such sales to China in recent years.

    But the regulations also have broader goals: having allied countries be the location of choice for companies to build the world’s biggest data centers, in an effort to keep the most advanced A.I. models within the borders of the United States and its partners.

    Governments around the world, particularly in the Middle East, have been pumping money into attracting and building enormous data centers, in a bid to become the next center for A.I. development.

    Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Sunday that the rule would ensure that the infrastructure for training the most advanced artificial intelligence would be in the United States or in the jurisdiction of close allies, and “that capacity does not get offshored like chips and batteries and other industries that we’ve had to invest hundreds of billion dollars to bring back onshore.”

    Mr. Sullivan said the rule would provide “greater clarity to our international partners and to industry,” while countering national security threats from malicious actors that could use “American technologies against us.”

    It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to keep the new rules or how to enforce them. In a call with reporters on Sunday, Biden administration officials said that the rules had bipartisan support and that they had been in consultations with the incoming administration about them.

    Though companies in China have begun to develop their own A.I. chips, the global market for such semiconductors is dominated by U.S. companies, particularly Nvidia. That dominance has given the U.S. government the ability to regulate the flow of A.I. technology worldwide, by restricting U.S. company exports.

    Companies have protested those limitations, saying the restrictions could hamper innocuous or even beneficial types of computing, anger U.S. allies and ultimately push global buyers into buying non-American products, like those made by China.

    In a statement, Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president for government affairs, called the rule “unprecedented and misguided” and said it “threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.”

    “Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead,” he said. Nvidia’s stock dipped nearly 2 percent on Monday.

    Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in a statement that the company was confident it could “comply fully with this rule’s high security standards and meet the technology needs of countries and customers around the world that rely on us.”

    In a letter to congressional leadership on Sunday that was viewed by The New York Times, Jason Oxman, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a group representing tech companies, asked Congress to step in and use its authority to overturn the action if the Trump administration did not.

    John Neuffer, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said his group was “deeply disappointed that a policy shift of this magnitude and impact is being rushed out the door days before a presidential transition and without any meaningful input from industry.”

    “The stakes are high, and the timing is fraught,” Mr. Neuffer added.

    China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Monday that it opposed the restrictions, calling them an expansion of Washington’s “long-arm jurisdiction.” It said it would “take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”

    The rules, which run more than 200 pages, also set up a system in which companies that operate data centers, like Microsoft and Google, can apply for special government accreditations.

    In return for following certain security standards, these companies can then trade in A.I. chips more freely around the globe. The companies will still have to agree to keep 75 percent of their total A.I. computing power within the United States or allied countries, and to locate no more than 7 percent of their computing power in any single other nation.

    The rules also set up the first controls on weights for A.I. models, the parameters unique to each model that determine how artificial intelligence makes its predictions. Companies setting up data centers abroad will be required to adopt security standards to protect this intellectual property and prevent adversaries from gaining access to it.

    Governments facing restrictions can raise the number of A.I. chips they can import freely by signing agreements with the U.S. government, in which they would agree to align with U.S. goals for protecting A.I.

    Under the guidance of the U.S. government, Microsoft struck an agreement to team up with an Emirati firm, G42, last year, in return for G42’s eliminating Huawei equipment from its systems and taking other steps.

    The Biden administration could issue more rules related to chips and A.I. in the coming days, including an executive order to encourage domestic energy generation for data centers, and new rules that aim to keep the most cutting-edge chips out of China, people familiar with the deliberations said.

    The latter rule is a response to an incident last year in which U.S. officials discovered that Huawei, a Chinese telecom firm under U.S. sanctions, had been obtaining components for its A.I. chips that were manufactured by a leading Taiwanese chip firm, in violation of U.S. export controls.

    The announcements are among a flurry of new regulations that the Biden administration is rushing to issue before the presidential turnover as it tries to close loopholes and cement its legacy on countering China’s technological development. The administration has issued new limits on exports of chip-making equipment to China and other countries, proposed new restrictions on Chinese drones, added new Chinese companies to a military blacklist and hurried to complete new subsidies for U.S. chip manufacturing.

    But the A.I. regulations issued Monday appear to be among the most sweeping and consequential of these actions. Artificial intelligence is quickly transforming how scientists carry out research, how companies allocate tasks between their employees and how militaries operate. While A.I. has many beneficial uses, U.S. officials have grown more concerned that it could enable the development of new weapons, help countries surveil dissidents and otherwise upend the global balance of power.

    Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at the RAND Corporation, said the rules would create a framework for protecting U.S. security interests while still allowing firms to compete abroad. “They are also forward-looking, trying to preserve U.S. and allied-led supply chains before they are offshored to the highest subsidy bidder,” he said.

    Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong.



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  • Jamie Dimon says geopolitical risks are surging: ‘Conditions are treacherous and getting worse’

    Jamie Dimon says geopolitical risks are surging: ‘Conditions are treacherous and getting worse’


    JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon speaks during the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing on Wall Street firms, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 6, 2023.

    Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

    JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sees risks climbing around the world amid widening conflicts in the Middle East and with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showing no signs of abating.

    “We have been closely monitoring the geopolitical situation for some time, and recent events show that conditions are treacherous and getting worse,” Dimon said Friday in the bank’s third-quarter earnings release.

    “There is significant human suffering, and the outcome of these situations could have far-reaching effects on both short-term economic outcomes and more importantly on the course of history,” he said.

    The international order in place since the end of World War II is unraveling in light of conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, rising U.S.-China tensions, and the risk of “nuclear blackmail” from Iran, North Korea and Russia, Dimon said last month during a fireside chat held at Georgetown University.

    “It’s ratcheting up, folks, and it takes really strong American leadership and Western world leaders to do something about that,” Dimon said at Georgetown. “That’s my No. 1 concern, and it dwarves any I’ve had since I’ve been working.”

    The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas recently hit the one-year mark since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked war, and there have been few signs of it slowing down. Tens of thousands of people have been killed as the conflict has broadened into fighting on multiple fronts, including with Hezbollah and Iran.

    At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 injured in Beirut from Israeli airstrikes on Thursday. Iran launched more than 180 missiles against Israel on Oct. 1, and worries have risen that an Israeli retaliation could target Iranian oil facilities.

    Meanwhile, the Russian government approved a draft budget last week that boosted defense spending by 25% from 2024 levels, a sign that Russia is determined to continue its invasion of Ukraine, analysts say.

    Dimon also said Friday that he remained wary about the future of the economy, despite signs that the Federal Reserve has engineered a soft landing.

    “While inflation is slowing and the U.S. economy remains resilient, several critical issues remain, including large fiscal deficits, infrastructure needs, restructuring of trade and remilitarization of the world,” Dimon said. “While we hope for the best, these events and the prevailing uncertainty demonstrate why we must be prepared for any environment.” 

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  • Putin seen winning an expected landslide 88% of Russian election vote

    Putin seen winning an expected landslide 88% of Russian election vote


    President Vladimir Putin won a record post-Soviet landslide in Russia’s election on Sunday, cementing his grip on power. However, thousands of opponents staged a noon protest at polling stations and the United States said the vote was neither free nor fair.

    For Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who first rose to power in 1999, the result is intended to underscore to the West that its leaders will have to reckon with an emboldened Russia, whether in war or peace, for many more years to come.

    The early result means Putin, 71, will quickly secure a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.

    According to an exit poll by pollster the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), Putin won 87.8% of the vote, the highest result in Russia’s post-Soviet history. The Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) put Putin at 87%. The first official results indicated that the polls were accurate.

    “The elections are obviously not free nor fair given how Mr. Putin has imprisoned political opponents and prevented others from running against him,” the White House’s National Security Council spokesperson said.

    The election comes just over two years since Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War Two by ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He casts it as a “special military operation.”

    War has hung over the three-day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions, and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces – a move Putin said would not be left unpunished.

    While Putin’s re-election is not in doubt, given his control over Russia and the absence of any real challengers, the former KGB spy wanted to show that he has the overwhelming support of Russians. Several hours before polls closed at 1800 GMT, the nationwide turnout surpassed 2018 levels of 67.5%.

    Supporters of Putin’s most prominent opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to come out at a “Noon against Putin” protest to show their dissent against a leader they cast as a corrupt autocrat.

    There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, which were held amid highly tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.

    Reuters journalists saw an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.

    Some said they were protesting, though there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.

    As noon arrived across Asia and Europe, hundreds of people gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of “Yulia, Yulia.”

    Exiled Navalny supporters broadcast footage on YouTube of protests inside Russia and abroad.

    ‘People saw they were not alone’

    “We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia that Putin has seized power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude — many people saw they were not alone.”

    Leonid Volkov, an exiled Navalny aide who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimated hundreds of thousands of people had come out to polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.

    At least 74 people were arrested on Sunday across Russia, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent.

    Over the previous two days, there were scattered incidents of protest as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them scumbags and traitors. Opponents posted some pictures of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Putin.

    But Navalny’s death has left the opposition deprived of its most formidable leader, and other major opposition figures are abroad, in jail or dead.

    The West casts Putin as an autocrat and a killer. U.S. President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a “crazy SOB.” The International Criminal Court in the Hague has indicted him for the alleged war crime of abducting Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.

    Putin casts the war as part of a centuries-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated Russia after the Cold War by encroaching on Moscow’s sphere of influence.

    “Putin’s task is now to imprint his worldview indelibly into the minds of the Russian political establishment” to ensure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.

    “For a U.S. administration that hoped Putin’s Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow’s interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring.”

    Russia’s election comes at what Western spy chiefs say is a crossroads for the Ukraine war and the wider West in what Biden casts as a 21st-century struggle between democracies and autocracies.

    Support for Ukraine is tangled in U.S. domestic politics ahead of the November presidential election, which pits Biden against his predecessor, Donald Trump. Trump’s Republican party in Congress has blocked military aid for Kyiv.

    Though Kyiv recaptured territory after the invasion in 2022, Russian forces have lately made gains after a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive last year.

    The Biden administration fears Putin could grab a bigger slice of Ukraine unless Kyiv gets more support soon. CIA Director William Burns has said that could embolden China.

    Putin says the West is engaged in a hybrid war against Russia and that Western intelligence and Ukraine are trying to disrupt the elections.

    Voting also took place in Crimea, which Moscow took from Ukraine in 2014, and four other Ukrainian regions it partly controls and has claimed since 2022. Kyiv regards the election on occupied territory as illegal and void.



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  • Ewan McGregor transforms into Count Alexander Rostov in “A Gentleman in Moscow'”

    Ewan McGregor transforms into Count Alexander Rostov in “A Gentleman in Moscow’”


    Ewan McGregor transforms into Count Alexander Rostov in “A Gentleman in Moscow’” – CBS News


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    Emmy-winning actor Ewan McGregor stars in the highly anticipated adaptation of the best-selling novel “A Gentleman in Moscow.” Set against the backdrop of post-revolution Russia, the series follows the life of Count Alexander Rostov as he faces a life of house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel.

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