Alexei Navalny

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday promised "harsh" punishment for foreign interference in next year's election, where he will seek to extend his decades-long grip on power into the 2030s.

Bulgarian MP Delyan Peevski has raised serious concerns regarding the apparent circumvention of international sanctions against Russia by individuals closely linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling for urgent investigations by the country's law enforcement agencies.

The Association "For Free Russia" is organizing today in Sofia, Varna and Burgas an event under the title "Putin is a killer" on the occasion of the third anniversary of the attempt to poison the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Belarus welcomed the head of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin into exile on Tuesday following an aborted rebellion, as NATO warned it was ready to defend against "Moscow or Minsk".

The death toll from a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in eastern Ukraine rose to eight on Wednesday, as Kiev played down the effect of a brief mutiny by the head of the Wagner mercenary group on the conflict.

From February 24 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, until April of this year, more than 200 applications were submitted to the Bulgarian State Agency for Refugees requesting the granting of political asylum to citizens of the Russian Federation. Of these, only 8 were approved, according to data from the emigrant organization "For Free Russia", founded in Bulgaria.

Day 418 of the invasion of Ukraine. Summary of key events in the last 24 hours:

A small concrete box marked with the word SHIZO (punishment cell in Russian) in giant red letters sits incongruously next to a 13th-century church just behind the Louvre museum in Paris.

The grey box is a mock-up of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's punishment prison cell that his team unveiled in the French capital on March 14.

A powerful message from the Oscars ceremony. The film "Navalny" created with the participation of Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev won the Oscar in the category of documentary cinema.

"We owe a lot to Christo Grozev, Christo, you risked so much and did so much for this film. We also thank Alexei Navalny and his family," said director Daniel Rohr.

Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev was forced to leave Austria, where he has lived for nearly 20 years. According to the Viennese newspaper "Falter", he was threatened by the Russian security services, "24 Chasa" reported.

According to Grozev, he suspects that "there are more Russian agents than policemen" in the Austrian capital.