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Exclusive: We discovered what's going on inside Russia's shadow fleet
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Exclusive: We discovered what's going on inside Russia's shadow fleet

by Tanya Kozyreva

The vessels are old, their hulls streaked with rust, and their ownership obscured behind layers of shell companies. Yet the tankers that make up Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the armada used to move sanctioned oil across the globe, are kept running with modern Western technology including Starlink, an investigation by the Kyiv Independent can reveal. To gain an insight into how the shadow fleet operates, the Kyiv Independent spoke to two Ukrainian sailors who claim they unwittingly became p

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Another Orban? Here's why you should care about Bulgaria's upcoming elections

A new Russian-friendly leader may soon emerge in the EU and NATO — this time, in the Balkans. A week after Kremlin ally Viktor Orban lost his reelection campaign in Hungary, Bulgaria's former President Rumen Radev is poised to win the April 19 snap parliamentary election. Radev, Bulgaria's two-term head of state, resigned in January to lead his new Progressive Bulgaria coalition into the country's eighth parliamentary elections since 2021, quickly surging in the polls. As president, Radev has

'Ukraine is becoming a global player' amid Iran war, European defense deals

Ukraine is riding high on a series of deals that promise to intertwine  its wartime defense-tech industry, now known for producing drones in high demand worldwide, with European arms makers. “The general idea is that we as an industry have to become part of a pan-European defense industry,” Ihor Fedirko, director of the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry, a government-aligned trade association for Ukrainian weapons makers, told the Kyiv Independent. Fedirko, a former adviser to the now-shut

About Russia

The Kyiv Independent’s coverage of news on Russia. Spanning eleven time zones across Eastern Europe and Asia, Russia has an estimated population of 146 million people. Russia’s capital city is Moscow, which is home to almost one in 10 Russians. Russia’s official currency is the Russian Ruble.

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