Opposition to Vladimir Putin in Russia

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.

Day 519 of the invasion of Ukraine. Summary of key events in the last 24 hours:

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.

"There is no reason to accept that the official authorities in the Russian Federation are indiscriminately carrying out mass repressions against citizens expressing in one way or another dissatisfaction with the president's policy".

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.

The documentary about the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in the creation of which the Bulgarian journalist Cristo Grozev from the Bellingcat platform also participated, has been nominated for an Oscar.

The film Navalny (2021, USA) by Canadian director Daniel Rohr follows Grozev as he searches for Navalny's poisoners.

Here are the highlights of events related to the war in Ukraine over the past 24 hours:

MEPs want sanctions for 6 thousand Russians from the Navalny list. Two Bulgarians among them

Active citizens in Sofia want the Sofia Municipal Council to transfer the name of "Boris Nemtsov Square" from the area around Joliot-Curie Metro Station and the Embassy of North Macedonia to the area directly in front of the Embassy of the Russian Federation. Here is the full statement of the activists:

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been entered in the register of terrorists and extremists, Russian media reported, based on data from the Financial Monitoring Service.

The bank accounts of those included in the register are frozen. They can be investigated and convicted in extremism cases.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was nominated on Monday (27 September) for the European Parliament's annual human rights prize as European Union lawmakers sought to keep the public spotlight on his pro-democracy network, which has been banned in Russia.