Russian journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva says she will appeal after a court found her guilty of "justifying terrorism" and ordered her to pay a fine of 500,000 rubles (about $7,000). The court in the western Russian city of Pskov announced its verdict on July 6 in a case that has drawn condemnation from human rights groups. The charges related to a 2018 article Prokopyeva wrote linking a suicide bombing to Russia's political climate.
Chechen militants led by Shamil Basayev on June 14, 1995, took about 1,500 hostages in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk and seized a hospital. More than 100 died in the course of the five-day drama, many after failed attempts by Russian forces to free the hostages. It came just months after Russian forces launched the First Chechen War in December 1994.
A woman held hostage by Chechen separatists has spoken about it on camera for the first time, 25 years after a five-day siege that left some 150 people dead in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk.
Armed Russian policemen moved along a street near the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters in Moscow, in mobile phone footage posted on December 19. In other footage, the sound of shots ringing out could be heard. A reporter for Current Time TV filmed police sealing off the area.
Three children look happy and healthy now with their grandparents in Georgia, but that's after living for a year with their mother in an Iraqi jail. Their father, an Islamic State militant, was killed in Iraq, and the Georgian government is still trying to bring her home.
Fifteen years ago, militants with ties to the insurgency in Chechnya stormed a school in Beslan, southern Russia, taking more than 1,200 children and adults hostage. For a brief moment, a mother and her young son were at the center of the crisis, as she volunteered to act as a messenger between the militants and Russian forces.
Some of the teachers who survived the Beslan massacre are still working, and still haunted by the days in 2004 when 334 people were killed in their school.
Russia’s Investigative Committee says two suspected members of the extremist Islamic State group have been “liquidated” in a security operation in central Russia.
