Anton Kartavin News Today

Local officials in Russia’s third-largest city scrapped direct mayoral elections on Wednesday.

On a recent cold March afternoon, a handful of people gathered on a square in downtown Ulyanovsk, a midsized Russian city on the Volga River, to demand the return of direct elections for the city’s mayorship.  Despite a large police presence, the gathering — which featured speeches from local activists and politicians — went ahead without a single arrest.   “Forty participants might seem like very little,” Konstantin Tolkachev, a local lawyer who organized the protest, told The Mosc...

A court in Moscow has issued additional arrest warrants for several close associates of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, this time on charges of creating an extremist group.