RFE/RL: A Moscow court has sentenced a member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot to 15 days in jail for allegedly disobeying police orders, just two days after she was released on a similar charge. Nika Nikulshina was detained late on July 2 in Moscow for expressing “gross obscene language” in a public place and refusing to cooperate with police, according to court documents obtained by the independent news website Mediazona.
RFE/RL: Russia on July 4 announced 25,142 new Covid-19 infections, the highest figure since early January as the country battles the surging Delta variant of the virus. This week Russia reported record numbers of coronavirus deaths for five days in a row, registering 697 Covid-19 fatalities on July 3. On July 4, the official tally showed 663 people dying of COVID-19 over the past 24 hours, pushing the national death toll to 137,925.
RFE/RL: Crimea’s identity as a point of conflict among regional powers has been recognized since at least the 5th century BC, when Herodotus described the Scythians who lived there as barbarians who drank wine from gilded skulls, burned lots of cannabis, and feted Greeks who arrived on their territory with pomp and sacrifice. What the Greek historian could not have foreseen is that an invader from the east would seize the Black Sea peninsula 2,400 years later, dig everything up, and claim for itself the historical legacies of all who came before.
