Russian television host Vladimir Posner has failed to live up to his promise to invite opposition politicians onto his popular talk show before the end of March, Kasparov.ru reports.

In an interview on February 24, Posner spoke to GZT.ru about his plans to invite oppositionists who are effectively banned from appearing on state-controlled television onto his show. The first, he said, would be Solidarity co-leader Boris Nemtsov, whom he planned to invite sometime in March.

"I plan to invite Boris Nemtsov. I’m definitely going to refer to the conversation with Putin that took place in the presence of [Channel One General Director] Konstantin Ernst and another 25 people from the channel,” Posner said at the time.

But on April 1, which happened to be Posner’s 77th birthday in addition to the end of March, Nemtsov wrote in abirthday greeting to the host that neither he nor ...

Russia’s Federal Security Service believes that foreign telecommunications services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Skype present a threat to Russian national security and should be banned, Marker.ru reports.

On April 6, Chief Aleksandr Andreechkin of the FSB Center for the Defense of Information and Government Communications told a session of the Government Commission on Federal Communications and Issues of Information Technology that the use of foreign means of encryption to provide telecommunication services in Russia has raised the concerns of the FSB and other security services. In particular, he noted the problem of how servers for the encryption of some of these services are located abroad. This includes, for example, Gmail, Hotmail, and the online telephone service Skype.

The FSB is concerned that the fact that these servers are located abroad makes it more difficult to carry out operational search ...

An acting police chief who assaulted a female journalist in the Moscow suburb of Moskovsky has been fired following media reports about the incident, RIA Novosti reports.

On Monday, Police Colonel General Nikolai Golovkin said an investigation of the incident concluded that the conflict arose after journalist Natalya Seybil made a remark about how Major Aleksei Klimov had parked his car, "and we also established his inappropriate behavior in the form of an assault of Natalya Seybil.”

"Following the assertion all circumstances by the administration of the Moscow Regional Main Department of Internal Affairs, a decision was made to fire the officer in question from internal affairs,” Golovkin explained. "The question is being decided on whether to file criminal charges and transfer materials to the Investigative Committee of the Moscow Regional Main Investigative Department of the Russian Federation to make a ...