Russia is starting to see a wave of mass layoffs as a result of the plunging economy and needs to rethink where and how fast it spends its reserves, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin said.

Two Russian officials in as many days suggested that Russians will persevere through the economic crisis by tightening their belts, statements that prompted opposition activists to cry hypocrisy.

The founder of an online support group for LGBT teenagers, has been fined 50,000 rubles ($780) for violating Russia's controversial law against the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors."

Russia prevented the U.N. Security Council on Saturday from criticizing statements by pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels and condemning an upsurge in violence that has claimed dozens of lives in Ukraine, council diplomats said.

Russia's top airlines are eyeing the specter of bankruptcy in 2015 following last year's ruble meltdown, which decimated travel spending and drastically upped the costs of maintaining carriers' fleets.

A program giving every resident of Russia's Far East a free hectare of land could start this year, the minister in charge of the region said Tuesday, following a nod of support from President Vladimir Putin the day before.

Two members of an art collective were detained for flinging holy water at the Moscow mausoleum containing Vladimir Lenin's corpse, in an apparent bid to resurrect the revolutionary leader.

Russia's political and economic alliances with its neighbors in the post-Soviet space are delivering little more than mutual disappointment, writes columnist Yulia Zhuchkova.

After decades of mystifying foreign tourists, the Moscow metro system will test out announcing the names of stations in English, news agency Interfax cited the metro's head as saying Thursday.

Russia is determined to play a leading role in the new multipolar world that the United States relentlessly opposes and will not give up on Ukraine until a desirable outcome is reached, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists during an annual news conference Wednesday.