March 1:
Russia is ready to resume cooperation with the United States on strategic issues, a top Kremlin diplomat has said. "Moscow will be ready to resume cooperation at any time and through all channels, including within the presidential commission, or in other formats that suit the USA," Interfax reports Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov as telling a news conference in Moscow. Yet the potential for cooperation is circumscribed by the current, negative state of bilateral relations, Rybakov said, and "this lengthy and very negative swell of anti-Russian speeches and attacks is currently undermining trust in the USA as a reliable partner." The current, negative state of affairs, according to the diplomat, reflects a "bipartisan anti-Russian consensus" that has emerged in American politics.
The number of disabled people in Russia is dwindling, but the cause isn't improved healthcare or better treatment. Rather, The Moscow Times reports, the decline - from "12,946 million at the beginning of 2014 to 12,450 million in September last year" - is caused by a new disability assessment system that has been adopted by the country's Labor Ministry, the result of which has been the removal of disability status from some 500,000 Russian citizens.
Russia's interior ministry is seeking to head off potential political unrest. According to NEWSru.com, Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Gorovoy has warned that the country's security forces will not permit "mass protests" to take place in the run up to regional and State Duma elections this coming September. "We will be obliged to use a range of measures, including harsh ones, to stop such actions," Gorovoy has told Russian news sources.
March 2:
In the latest incident of Islamist violence to take place in the Russian Federation, a 4-year-old girl has been beheaded by her nanny in Moscow. CBS News reports that the woman, from Uzbekistan, shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great in Arabic) while brandishing the child's head outside a metro station in the city's northwest. She was taken into police custody thereafter. Russian authorities, meanwhile, have imposed a virtual media blackout on the affair.
March 3:
The plot surrounding the death of Russia's former military spy chief has thickened. Former GRU head Col.-Gen. Igor Sergun was reported back in January to have died from a heart attack at his home outside Moscow. But rumors about Sergun's death under suspicious circumstances have persisted. Now, a Lebanese newspaper has charged that Sergun was actually killed while on a secret Mideast mission for the Kremlin. TheJerusalem Post, citing Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper, reports that Sergun "died three weeks after he was sent to Syria by Russian President Vladimir Putin to demand Syrian President Bashar Assad step aside," and did so in "a complicated secret mission [in which] several Arab and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies took part."
Popular unrest in Russia is growing, and the country will soon begin witnessing "mass disturbances," a prominent Russian economist has said. Speaking with the independent Dozhd television station, Sergei Alexashenko, a former deputy finance minister under the administration of Boris Yeltsin, has argued that increasing political turmoil is to be expected in Russia, even though the national unemployment rate "will never" reach 10% as a result of governmental manipulation.
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