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🔗 Human rights 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Poland 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Military history/Polish military history 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Katyn massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, "Katyń crime"; Russian: Катынская резня Katynskaya reznya, "Katyn massacre", or Russian: Катынский расстрел, "Katyn execution by shooting") was a series of mass executions of about 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal of 5 March 1940 to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests". The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Polish Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Polish Jews including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.

The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943. Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The USSR claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.

An investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder. The investigation was closed on the grounds the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable.

In November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 English Language

In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation. The term has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is unsubstantiated.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident project 🔗 Death 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Malaysia

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage of the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred in the War in Donbas in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels.

The responsibility for investigation was delegated to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), who concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. According to the JIT, the Buk that was used originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area and the launch system returned to Russia afterwards. The findings by the DSB and JIT are consistent with the earlier claims by American and German intelligence sources and claims by the Ukrainian government. On the basis of the JIT's conclusions, the governments of the Netherlands and Australia held Russia responsible for the deployment of the Buk installation and were pursuing legal routes as of May 2018. The Russian government denied involvement in the shooting down of the airplane, and its account of how the aircraft was shot down has varied over time. Coverage in Russian media has also differed from that in other countries.

This was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014, after the disappearance of Flight 370 on 8 March, and is the deadliest airliner shoot-down incident to date.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Geography 🔗 Poland 🔗 Lithuania 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Polish military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Belarus 🔗 NATO

The Suwałki Gap, also known as the Suwałki corridor ([suˈvawkʲi] (listen)), is a sparsely populated area immediately southwest of the border between Lithuania and Poland, between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Named after the Polish town of Suwałki, this choke point has become of great strategic and military importance since Poland and the Baltic states joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The border between Poland and Lithuania was formed after the Suwałki Agreement of 1920; but it carried little importance in the interwar period as at the time, the Polish lands stretched farther northeast, while during the Cold War, Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union and communist Poland belonged to the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact created borders that cut through the shortest land route between Kaliningrad (Russian territory isolated from the mainland) and Belarus (Russia's ally). As the Baltic states and Poland eventually joined NATO, this narrow border stretch between Poland and Lithuania became a vulnerability for the military bloc because, if a hypothetical military conflict were to erupt between Russia and Belarus on one side and NATO on the other, the capture of the 65 km (40 mi)-long strip of land between Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast and Belarus would likely jeopardise NATO's attempts to defend the Baltic states. NATO's fears about the Suwałki Gap intensified after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and launched the war in Donbas, and further increased after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. These worries prompted the alliance to increase its military presence in the area, and an arms race was triggered by these events.

Both Russia and the European Union countries also saw great interest in civilian uses of the gap. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia attempted to negotiate an extraterritorial corridor to connect its exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast with Grodno in Belarus, but Poland, Lithuania and the EU did not consent. Movement of goods through the gap was disrupted in summer 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Lithuania and the European Union introduced transit restrictions on Russian vehicles as part of their sanctions. The Via Baltica road, a vital link connecting Finland and the Baltic states with the rest of the European Union, goes through the area and, as of November 2022, is under construction in Poland as expressway S61.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/economy of Russia

Kostroma Moose Farm (Russian: Костромска́я лосефе́рма) is an experimental farm in Kostroma Oblast, Russia, where a herd of moose is kept, primarily for milk production; the farm supplies moose's milk to a nearby sanitorium. It is located near the village of Sumarokovo in Krasnoselsky District of Kostroma Oblast, some 25 km east of the city of Kostroma.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia

Padonkaffsky jargon (Russian: язык падонкафф, yazyk padonkaff) or Olbanian (олбанский, olbanskiy) is a cant language developed by a subculture of Runet called padonki (Russian: падонки). It started as an Internet slang language originally used in the Russian Internet community. It is comparable to the English-based Leet. Padonkaffsky jargon became so popular that the former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev jokingly suggested that Olbanian be taught in schools.

🔗 United States 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history

An explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG) is a device used to generate a high-power electromagnetic pulse by compressing magnetic flux using high explosive.

An EPFCG only ever generates a single pulse as the device is physically destroyed during operation. They require a starting current pulse to operate, usually supplied by capacitors.

Explosively pumped flux compression generators are used to create ultrahigh magnetic fields in physics and materials science research and extremely intense pulses of electric current for pulsed power applications. They are being investigated as power sources for electronic warfare devices known as transient electromagnetic devices that generate an electromagnetic pulse without the costs, side effects, or enormous range of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse device.

The first work on these generators was conducted by the VNIIEF center for nuclear research in Sarov in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1950s followed by Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (Russian: Анна Степановна Политковская, IPA: [ˈanːə sʲtʲɪˈpanəvnə pəlʲɪtˈkofskəjə]; Ukrainian: Ганна Степанівна Політковська, IPA: [ˈɦɑnːɐ steˈpɑn⁽ʲ⁾iu̯nɐ pol⁽ʲ⁾itˈkɔu̯sʲkɐ]; née Mazepa, Мазепа, IPA: [mɐˈzɛpɐ]; 30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist, and human rights activist, who reported on political events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War (1999–2005).

It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, and had to turn back, requiring careful medical treatment in Moscow to restore her health.

Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into books several times; Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper that featured critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published Putin's Russia, a personal account of Russia for a Western readership.

On 7 October 2006, she was murdered in the elevator of her block of apartments, an assassination that attracted international attention. In June 2014, five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it is still unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Lithuania 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages 🔗 Beer

Kvass is a fermented cereal-based non-alcoholic or low alcoholic (0.5–1.0% or 1–2 proof) beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-dark brown colour and sweet-sour taste. It may be flavoured with berries, fruits, herbs, honey

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Spaceflight/space stations working group

The terms Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS), Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (APAS) and Androgynous Peripheral Docking System (APDS) are used interchangeably to describe a Russian family of spacecraft docking mechanisms, and are also sometimes used as generic names for any docking system in that family. A system similar to APAS-89/95 is used by the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft.