State-backed $100 million fund will support domestic startups and help...
Sber, the state-controlled financial and digital giant, and RVC (Russian Venture Company, now affiliated to the sovereign wealth fund RDIF) yesterday announced plans to launch a joint $100 million fund...
View ArticleFrom gene bombs to classroom curriculum: How Vladimir Putin became infatuated...
Until recently, the Russian authorities showed little interest in genetics. The breakthrough came in 2019, when the government allocated 127 billion rubles (around $1.7 billion at the current exchange...
View ArticleShould Russian banks be scared of SWIFT disconnection?
In a meeting with EU foreign ministers, Ukraine’s top diplomat Dmytro Kuleba joined the chorus of voices calling for Russia to be disconnected from SWIFT — the financial messaging network that...
View ArticleYouTube deletes hyperlinks to Navalny voting initiative
YouTube has started deleting hyperlinks to Alexey Navalny’s ‘SmartVote‘ project — a strategic voting initiative designed to identify candidates with the best statistical odds of defeating politicians...
View ArticleRussia’s central district deploys smart vehicle tracing system to “improve...
A “unified end-to-end system for intercepting and tracing vehicles” is being deployed on the roads of a huge region of Russia: the Central Federal District (CFD), which spans across 650,200 square...
View ArticleOnline video leader IVI raises $250 million from state and private investors,...
Russian online video major IVI announced today a $250 million funding round involving top state and private investors. This is one of the biggest deals of the past years on the Russian tech scene, and...
View ArticleRussian government could invest more than $10 billion for electric and...
The Russian government plans to invest 777 billion rubles ($10.5 billion) into electric and hydrogen vehicle development by 2030, according to documents obtained by the Vedomosti news outlet. In the...
View ArticleRussia may be cut off from SWIFT as part of West’s “spiral of sanctions,”...
Russian banks may be blocked from using SWIFT, a payment system that enables reliable and secure financial transactions, as part of restrictions against Moscow, in what one official has called a...
View ArticleSber and VTB CEOs blast Bitcoin
Sber and VTB, two leading, state-controlled financial institutions in Russia, are not willing to move into the cryptocurrency market in the near future as their CEOs believe that crypto is either too...
View ArticleHigh tech reverberations from the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum
A notable part of this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) was dedicated to IT and digital transformation as well as the state’s role in these fields (see the forum’s topical...
View ArticleRussian oligarch Deripaska blasts Bank of Russia for ignoring Bitcoin
Russian industrial tycoon Oleg Deripaska is the latest figure to criticize the Bank of Russia’s stance on cryptocurrency regulation in the country. Deripaska took to his official Telegram channel on...
View ArticleRussia seeks funding for Putin’s ‘genetic database’
Earlier this month Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a series of orders to determine the needed funds and sources for Russia’s national genetic database program. The move followed a visit to the...
View ArticleScience, technology and information highlighted as battlefields in Russia’s...
On July 3 president Vladimir Putin signed off on a new national security strategy for Russia. This latest version develops the notion that Russia is surrounded by enemies threatening the country’s...
View ArticleBehind stereotypes: Putin’s cybercrime challenge
By Mark Galeotti, Director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, Honorary Professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies. Following recent cases of Russian-linked cyberespionage and...
View ArticleWhy is Russia not using Pegasus spyware?
When a group of international investigative journalists and researchers broke the news that spyware called Pegasus, produced by the Israeli NSO Group, had helped repressive governments across the world...
View ArticleRussia blocks 49 Navalny-linked websites, allies say
Russia’s Internet regulator Roskomnadzor on Monday blocked 49 websites linked to jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny. Among these sites ar his personal website where he published investigations into...
View ArticleRussia blocks Navalny mirror site using ‘Internet isolation’ tools – NGO
Russian authorities have blocked jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s mirror website using the tools that help telecom providers “isolate” Russia’s section of the internet, the privacy NGO...
View ArticleRussia demands YouTube block Navalny channel
Russian authorities have demanded that YouTube block jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s popular channel that has published viral investigations into corruption and fueled anti-government protests...
View ArticleHow Russia experiments with Internet isolation
Since 2019, cities across Russia have been testing ways to disconnect the Russian segment of the Internet (known colloquially as “Runet”) from the wider global network. Most tests go unnoticed by...
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