Founded in March 2013, Deti-404 (Children-404) strives to provide Russia's LGBT teenagers with a safe space where they can receive support from professional psychologists. Yelena Klimova, 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," she announced Friday.

Pinkshinyultrablast has been compared to 1990s British shoegazing groups, such as Slowdive and Ride. Five years after the release of "Happy Songs for Happy Zombies," Pinkshinyultrablast's first EP, the Russian shoegaze/dream-pop band will finally release its debut album, "Everything Else Matters," on Monday. The long delay was because of band members studying abroad and mixing delays, guitarist Roman Parinov explained in an interview with four members of the quintet over Skype.

A car burns on the street after the shelling of a residential sector of the east Ukrainian port city of Mariupol on Saturday. At least 30 lives were lost. As mortar fire rained down on Ukraine's turbulent east over the weekend, Russian, Ukrainian, and Western leaders demonstrated a readiness to raise the stakes in a conflict that has already claimed more than 5,000 lives.

Russian first deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov attends the sesion 'The Russia Outlook' in Davos Jan. 23. 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.

Ukrainian soldiers carrying the coffin containing the body of Tomaz Sukhiashvili, a Kiev-loyal Georgian fighter. TBILISI, Georgia — The return of a Georgian fighter's body to his homeland from Ukraine was a grim reminder of how eastern Ukraine's conflict carries traces of a war of a quarter-century ago. About 100 Georgian volunteers are fighting along with Ukrainian forces against Russia-backed separatist rebels, Georgian General Giorgi Kalandadze said Tuesday. Two are known to have died.

One of the protesters' signs featured the words “Hitler also had a high [approval] rating.” A protest initially sanctioned by city officials took a sour turn on Saturday as activists produced a sign comparing President Vladimir Putin's popularity with that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, news site OVD-Info reported. Three protesters were detained during the event.

State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin is leading Russia's delegation to PACE in Strasbourg this week. Russia is set to participate Monday in its first session at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) since it was stripped of its voting rights last year in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea. In April, PACE voted to suspend some of the Russian delegation's rights within the assembly, including its rights to vote and to participate in election-observation missions.

Former champion Maria Sharapova charged into the quarter-finals of the Australian Open on Sunday. U.S. Open semi-finalist Peng Shuai, taking the mantle from retired Chinese champion Li Na, stayed with the Russian second seed for seven games, but was blanked in the next eight as Sharapova set up a blockbuster showdown with Canadian sensation Eugenie Bouchard, a 6-1 5-7 6-2 winner over Romanian Irina-Camelia Begu.

An Amur tigress residing in the Kaliningrad zoo has found the silver lining behind Russia's long, dark winters: snowballs worthy of the plumpest snowmen. When giant snowballs first started popping up in Tatyana the tigress' enclosure, zoo employees assumed their colleagues had just been having some fun with the feline.

Mikhalkov’s “Sunstroke” tells the story of a White Army officer in Crimea. Nikita Mikhalkov's "Sunstroke," set in post-revolutionary Crimea, took the best film prize at Russia's Golden Eagle award ceremony, beating out Andrei Zvyagintsev's "Leviathan," which has been nominated in the best foreign-language film category at next month's Academy Awards.

The Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 sent shock waves through the post-Cold War security order. However, just a few hundred kilometers to the east of the Crimean Peninsula, a legal process is underway that may well see the de facto annexation of another region into the Russian Federation.

DAVOS, Switzerland — 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. Kudrin resigned from the government in 2011 to protest against soaring military spending, but is believed to still have the respect of and access to President Vladimir Putin.

Russia's flagship carrier Aeroflot quickly registered its disapproval of any possible bailout plan. 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. One of the first rumbles of crisis came in December, when Russia's third-biggest air carrier UTair failed to meet an obligation to repurchase 2.6 billion rubles ($40.8 million) of bonds.

Every nation gets the government it deserves, observed Joseph de Maistre, the Sardinian kingdom's diplomatic envoy to the Russian empire, some 200 years ago. He was commenting on Russians' deep-seated political apathy — a trait that persists to this day. Of course, Russia is no longer an absolute monarchy as it was in de Maistre's time. Nor is it a communist dictatorship, with the likes of Stalin using the threat of the Gulag to discourage political expression.

Pauline Kael was a film critic for The New Yorker magazine who entered the American political lexicon with a now-infamous statement about former U.S. President Richard Nixon's re-election: "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know." In the conservative, and later public, consciousness this was somehow translated to "how did Nixon win?