Jailed former head of oil giant Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been nominated by European lawmakers for the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize celebrating freedom of thought.

Hong Kong authorities arrested a Russian woman who tried to open a plane emergency exit in mid-air Thursday, the Russian Consulate General said.

Deputies of the Urals city of Yekaterinburg have officially appointed Yevgeny Roizman, the recent mayoral election's winner, as a mayor at the first meeting of the city's freshly elected legislative assembly.

Former Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov, who resigned from the Russian government in May, has been appointed a presidential aide, the Kremlin press service said on Friday.

Fyodor Bondarchuk, a famous Russian film maker, said on Friday that he planned to work on a film about Pavel Durov, now 28, the founder of VKontakte, an immensely popular social-networking website that has often been dubbed “Russia’s Facebook.”

Russian opposition leader and former prime minister Boris Nemtsov is currently under investigation for publicly inciting “extremist activity", local prosecutors told the press.

The People’s Artist of Russia Sergey Goryaev, aged 55, has passed away in Moscow.

On Monday, August 26, Russian billionaire-turned-politician Mikhail Prokhorov once again dismissed rumors that he would soon quit politics.

Maria Alyokhina, an imprisoned Pussy Riot activist, works at a school in the penal colony where she’s serving her sentence in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Region.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has lost his title of the owner of the world's largest yacht as the Emirati royal family has purchased the recently-built Azzam, which is 57-feet longer than his Eclipse.