Inside Russia / Outside Russia is a news insight by the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bangladesh on 02 February 2025
INSIDE RUSSIA
Putin approves takeover of Goldman Sachs subsidiary
Balchug Capital will acquire 100% shares in the Russian arm of the world’s second-largest investment bank
President Vladimir Putin has allowed the sale of the Russian division of US investment bank Goldman Sachs, according to a document published on the state portal for legal information.
The order, signed by the Russian president on Friday, said Balchug Capital JSC will be able to purchase 100% of shares in Goldman Sachs Bank, which is owned by the US-based Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
The deal was approved in line with a presidential decree on special economic measures in response to “unfriendly actions” by foreign states and organizations, the document read.
Balchug Capital JSC belongs to the Balchug Capital investment firm of Armenian businessman David Amaryan. According to the company’s data, it currently manages assets worth around $2 billion.
Balchug Capital JSC has previously acquired the assets of a Western firm seeking to leave Russia over the Ukraine conflict; purchasing the stock of US construction equipment manufacturing corporation, Caterpillar in 2024.
Goldman Sachs announced plans to withdraw from the Russian market just weeks after the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, becoming the first Wall Street institution to take such a decision. Later that year, Goldman Sachs Bank was included in a list of credit institutions which are banned from transactions of shares and stocks without special permission from the authorities in Moscow.
The world’s second-largest investment bank has operated a Russian subsidiary since 2008. However, according to RBK, the country was not a key market, and its loan book in Russia was valued at $650 million as of 2021.
Last year, Interfax ranked it as the 230th bank in Russia based on the amount of its assets.
Russia’s Quantum Leap: Rosatom’s Breakthrough Set to Transform AI, Healthcare, and More
A quantum research project conducted under the auspices of the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom is poised to cement Moscow’s place as one of world’s technological powerhouses.
Russia’s development of 50-qubit ion-based and rubidium neutral atom quantum computers in 2024 marks a key step in its quantum project roadmap.
The next phase is going to be unveiled in Moscow on February 8.
Russia’s accomplishments were made possible by a unique team of researchers and engineers of over 1,000 specialists, including about 600 scientists.
By 2030, Rosatom intends to build a viable quantum industry in Russia, which entails industrial-scale manufacturing of quantum computers.
Quantum computing is expected to benefit Russia in the following areas:
Healthcare and pharmaceuticals: development of new medicines thanks to the ability to model complex molecules, and prediction of future epidemics.
Transportation and logistics: charting optimal transport routes and prevention of traffic congestion.
Financial sector: minimization of risks and more accurate evaluation of credit ratings of various entities.
Artificial intelligence: boosting machine learning, image recognition and data processing capabilities of AIs.
OUTSIDE RUSSIA
Russia slams UN chief over Holocaust remarks
Russia has condemned Antonio Guterres for not mentioning the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz in his speech
Moscow has condemned remarks by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres which omitted mention of the Red Army’s role in freeing the inmates of Auschwitz, as well as the Soviet Union’s sacrifices in defeating Nazi Germany. Guterres spoke on Monday to mark the anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated on Saturday that the UN chief’s remarks were “outrageous” and accused him of yielding to “distorted political correctness popular in the West.”
Zakharova said that the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed on January 27, was established to honor the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. Located in southern Poland, it was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp during World War II, where over a million people, primarily Jews, were killed. “The feat of the liberator soldiers is immortal. No one has the right to downplay its significance or ignore it,” she said.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly’s memorial ceremony on Monday, Guterres honored the six million Jews murdered during the genocide and highlighted the dangers of rising anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. “We must stand up to these outrages. We must promote education, combat lies, and speak the truth,” he urged.
However, his speech did not specifically mention the Soviet Union’s role in World War II.
Russia considers it “outrageous” that “Guterres’ list of victims of Nazi crimes, including genocide –such as Jews, Roma, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those whom the Nazis ‘enslaved, persecuted, tortured, and killed’ – did not mention the multi-million losses of the USSR during World War II,” Zakharova said.
Moscow views such omissions as part of a broader trend to “downplay or completely deny the role of the Red Army and the peoples of the USSR in ensuring our common Victory, to falsify or distort the outcomes of World War II,” the spokeswoman explained.
In January, numerous events were held in Russia to commemorate the International Day of Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and to honor the Red Army soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, Zakharova pointed out. She highlighted these efforts as part of Russia’s commitment to preserving historical memory.
According to estimates, the Soviet Union suffered approximately 26.6 million fatalities during World War II, encompassing both military personnel and civilians. This was the largest death toll suffered by any country during the war.
SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION IN UKRAINE
Kiev committed ‘war crime’ in occupied Russian town
The Ukrainian forces deliberately targeted a boarding school in the city of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk Region, the Defense Ministry said
The Ukrainian forces have launched a targeted missile attack on a boarding school in the city of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk Region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.
The Russian air defenses detected multiple missiles fired from Ukraine’s Sumy Region towards Sudzha on Saturday, according to the ministry.
“The Ukrainian Armed Forces strike on a civilian facility in Sudzha demonstrated the terrorist, inhuman nature of those in power in Kiev,” the Defense Ministry stressed in its statement early Sunday.
Dozens of civilians were reportedly sheltering inside the targeted facility, but there is no reliable information yet on the number of casualties, according to Kursk Region’s acting governor, Aleksandr Khinstein.
“In any case, a rocket attack on a boarding school where civilians could be hiding is a crime that has no forgiveness and no statute of limitations,” Khinstein wrote in a post on Telegram, adding that the “inhuman brutality of the Kiev regime cannot be justified.”
Moscow previously accused Kiev of turning the boarding school in Sudzha into one of its “Nazi-style concentration camps” and repeatedly sought to draw international attention to the issue.
“We have ample evidence of ‘concentration camps’ being set up in a number of settlements controlled by militants… between 70 and 100 civilians were ‘herded’ into the basements of the boarding school in Sudzha, where they were harassed and subjected to violence,” Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the Security Council in September.
Rodion Miroshnik, a senior diplomat tasked by the Foreign Ministry with documenting alleged Ukrainian atrocities, delivered a similar warning in his report to the OSCE, adding that Russian civilians “were subjected to psychological abuse and used for filming propaganda stories by Ukrainian and foreign journalists.”
Kiev launched its incursion into the Russian region on August 6, seizing some territory but failing to advance deeper. The town of Sudzha, home to some 5,000 people, was arguably the biggest prize for the thousands of Kiev’s best-trained troops armed with Western equipment. Since taking the settlement a number of press tours for foreign outlets have been organized, with reporting focused on Russian civilians who could not evacuate from the war zone in time.
Earlier this month, Russian forces liberated another Kursk Region’s settlement of Russkoye Porechnoye, some 10 kilometers north of the still-occupied Sudzha, where they discovered multiple decomposing corpses of civilians stashed in basements throughout the village.
On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee released new evidence on the massacre, including footage of the interrogation of one of the suspected perpetrators. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the images released by the investigators “impossible to watch,” and condemned the perpetrators for deliberately targeting vulnerable people.
“What kind of inhuman being tortures elderly civilians, beats them, injures them, and then blows them up with grenades?” she asked, referring to the forensic evidence uncovered in the village. “The world must understand who the Westerners are sponsoring and that with Western money, with these hundreds of billions of dollars and euros, the Kiev regime is committing these atrocities, which testify to its neo-Nazi nature.”
The Defense Ministry said that the latest Ukrainian provocation in Sudzha “is aimed at distracting attention from the atrocities of the Kiev regime in the Kursk settlement of Russian Porechnoye.”
Russia strikes Ukraine’s gas infrastructure
The targeted facilities supported Kiev’s defense industrial complex, the Defense Ministry has said
The Russian military has launched a wave of strikes on Ukraine’s gas energy infrastructure, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has announced.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said that the group strike was carried out overnight and targeted facilities supporting operations of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex. “The objective of the strike has been met. All designated targets have been hit,” officials said, without providing enumerating the facilities affected or listing the forces involved in the attack.
Ukrainian officials have confirmed strikes in several regions while reporting blackouts, specifying damage to energy infrastructure in Poltava Region, and the Ukraine-controlled part of Zaporozhye Region.
Leader Vladimir Zelensky also said that there had been damage in Odessa, Sumy, Kharkov, Khmelnytsky, and Kiev Regions, and that the attack involved missiles, strike drones, and aerial bombs. He said that three people had been killed in Poltava, two in Sumy, and one in Kharkov, with many injured.
Russia has for months been conducting strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure supporting the country’s defense industrial production, as well as other military-linked facilities, while insisting that the attacks never target civilians. Moscow has also said that the raids are in retaliation for Kiev’s strikes on Russian residential buildings across the country, as well its oil processing facilities.
Moscow updates estimate of Ukrainian military losses
Kiev is unable to mobilize enough troops to replace those killed and wounded, the Russian Defense Ministry has said
Ukraine has been losing around 50,000 servicemen every month during the past half a year in the conflict with Russia, according to estimates by the Defense Ministry in Moscow.
In January, 51,960 Kiev troops were killed or severely wounded. The figure stood at 48,470 in December and 60,805 in November last year, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
The number of recruits in the Ukrainian military’s training centers has barely reached 30,000 per month since last summer, despite extensive mobilization efforts, the statement read.
The ministry also noted that, according to official Ukrainian figures, some 100,000 of the country’s troops have voluntarily abandoned their units since the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022.
“The changes to the legislation prepared by the Kiev regime under pressure from Western countries to reduce the mobilization age from 25 to 18 years are the only way for [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky to delay the cascading collapse of the front line in Donbass for a few more months,” the statement read.
Last week, Nikolay Schur, an adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office, said the government in Kiev will propose amendments in the coming days that offer incentives for males between the ages of 18 and 25 to sign voluntary contracts with the armed forces.
Men in that age group are currently not subject to mandatory mobilization under Ukrainian law. Zelensky has so far insisted that the situation will not change, despite the previous US administration of President Joe Biden reportedly pressuring Kiev to reduce the draft age to 18.
The Ukrainian leader told Bloomberg last week that what his country’s military needs is not more men, but more weapons from Western backers for the existing troops.
Last spring, faced with manpower shortages, mounting losses, and military setbacks, Ukraine lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Since then, numerous videos have appeared on social media showing Ukrainian conscription officers chasing potential recruits in the streets, brawling with them, and subjecting them to abuse. Reports of the mobilization growing increasingly violent and lawless have appeared not only in the local media, but also in the West.
INSIGHTS
Frexit in Africa: How the Continent is Severing Ties With France
France has withdrawn from more than 70% of the African countries where it deployed troops since the end of colonial rule in the 1960s.
Chad has announced a full withdrawal of 1,000 French troops from its territory. What other African nations have ceased France’s draining military presence?
1. Mali: In May 2022, the country terminated its defense deal with Paris, and the exit of 2,400 French soldiers was completed by December 2023.
2. Burkina Faso: In February 2023, the country ordered around 400 French troops to leave within a month.
3. Niger: Following the military coup on July 26, 2023, which had widespread support from the Nigerien population, France withdrew 1,500 soldiers in December 2023.
4. Central African Republic: In December 2022, a contingent of 130 French troops withdrew from the country.
Where is France expected to pull out next?
Senegal: The westernmost country in West Africa announced in November 2024 that France “should” close its military bases (home to 350 soldiers) by the end of 2025.
Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire): A French contingent of 600-1,000 troops is expected to withdraw by the end of January 2025.
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