Petersburg and Moscow barrels through the threadbare town of Lyuban When word gets out that the head of Russia’s state railway company — a close friend of President Vladimir V the station’s employees line up on the platform standing at attention saluting Russia’s modernization for the seconds it takes the train to fly through blue-eyed stare as the train passed the town where he was born with its pitted roads and crumbling buildings having shut down his small computer repair business Naperkovsky is leaving for another region in Russia hoping it is not too late to start a new life in a more prosperous place but his view boils down to this: “Gradually,” he said This will not be apparent at next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi nor is it visible from the German-engineered high-speed train It is along the highway between Moscow and St Petersburg — a narrow 430-mile stretch of road that is a 12-hour trip by car — that one sees the great stretches of Russia so neglected by the state that they seem drawn backward in time As the state’s hand recedes from the hinterlands people are struggling with choices that belong to past centuries: to heat their homes with a wood stove which must be fed by hand every three hours When the road has so deteriorated that ambulances cannot reach their home Naperkovsky is the kind of plain-spoken man’s man whom Russians would call a “muzhik.” He had something he wanted to pass on to Mr who has led Russia during 13 years of political stability and economic expansion “The people on the top do not know what is happening down here,” he said There are places where wild boars roam abandoned villages gorging themselves on the fruit of orchards planted by men There are spots on this highway where it seems time has stopped A former prison guard is spending his savings building wooden roadside chapels explaining that “many souls” weigh on his conscience A rescue worker from the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl is waiting for the apartment the Soviets promised him as a reward selling tea to travelers from a row of samovars A furor had erupted off a side street in Chudovo where the road was dirt and the houses were built of scrap lumber Her eyes and skin had the same honey-gold cast and she was a head taller than most of the men in the village At some point in the last year it had become clear that she was on the verge of becoming an unusual was the reason her family had sped up the wedding She looked like a neighborhood teenager hired to baby-sit the groom It was unclear how they had produced a bloody sheet brandished traditionally at Gypsy weddings to certify that her hymen had been broken (“You can break it with your hands,” said his mother the Education Ministry insisted that all children attend school Forty percent of the children here do not study at all Petersburg’s Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center The vacuum has allowed the tradition of child marriage to come roaring back women arrived to celebrate in crazy waves of color The master of ceremonies gripped a battery-powered microphone working the crowd into a delirium of gaiety Opa!” The tiny groom sat in a chair in the corner and their departure took place in a cascade of elaborate interrupted only once by a woman who pulled a guest aside and asked her to take one last look at the place she was leaving The M10 highway looks normal enough at the southern limits of St For the next 430 miles the surface of the highway varies from corduroy to jaw-rattling patchwork with few medians and frequently no lane markings at all Traffic creeps forward behind a procession of 18-wheelers hauling goods from the port of St passing villages with names like Cockroachville It is the most heavily traveled cargo route in Russia and yet for truck drivers complying with safety regulations it takes 24 hours to travel between the two cities vice president of the International Transport Academy the dismal condition of the highway has made national news about 10,000 vehicles got stuck in a traffic jam that extended more than 70 miles trapping some drivers for three days in subzero temperatures who heads a trade union of long-haul truck drivers described his drivers that week as “not even angry any more that year in and year out the same thing happens.” It is not that the Russian Federation cannot manage public works projects — next year’s Olympic Games are expected to cost $50 billion about three and a half times the cost of last year’s Summer Games in London recently spearheaded construction of the world’s longest undersea pipeline Putin will have been in charge for 18 years Asked about the M10 during an interview last year Putin faced in his first and second presidential terms He reclaimed authority over the security services He eliminated the popular election of governors He wrested television back from private hands He raised pensions and paid off Russia’s foreign debt Peskov mentioned the staggering decline of Brezhnev-era infrastructure his explanation had gone on for 28 sentences “in these circumstances it was impossible to think about a road between Moscow and St Set on an island in a mirror-like lake outside the city of Valdai was evidence that someone had cared a great deal about fixing something used by the Soviets to house tuberculosis patients has undergone a swift and lustrous renovation financed by a phalanx of state-connected companies like Sberbank its tower the colors of roses and clotted cream a tour guide shared the secret of the monastery’s rebirth: Mr so it is within his line of sight,” said the tour guide Yakovleva boasted that he visits frequently and spontaneously taking such a granular interest that he is apt to approach builders to question why they are using that shade of paint she described a magical scene of communion between “the sovereign,” as she called him and his people: His helicopter flies so low that when tourists call out to him from the ground Putin had made only a couple of official visits The cleric’s restraint was understandable — church officials have repeatedly weathered tabloid rumors that Mr Putin was secretly wed there to Alina Kabayeva a drunken workman told extravagant tales of amenities he had glimpsed within its high concrete walls like individual basins that would allow guests to bathe in honey and yogurt if there is life outside the Moscow ring road Putin’s motorcade to drive up the road now and then if only to ensure that it is well maintained If there is one thing that people in this part of the country crave from Mr They are the people who make public requests to him for five hours on live television in an annual ritual made for a modern-day czar where collective farms once extended for miles in all directions heading off the highway for more than a few miles is like leaving the known world peonies the size of volleyballs swimming in the haze of midsummer the woods are denser and harder to penetrate Five miles west of the M10 lies the village of Pochinok where the wilderness is slowly closing in around Nina Kolesnikova and her children If once animals living in this forest learned to avoid humans emerged from her house and found that her dog’s throat had been torn out She could make out the tracks of three large wolves across the kitchen garden “They have come to where the people are,” she said Between the great cities are hundreds of disappearing settlements: towns becoming villages The Soviets cut off support for them during efficiency drives in the 1960s and ’70s which categorized villages as “promising” or “unpromising.” But the death of a village is a slow process calls them “black holes,” and estimates that they make up 70 to 80 percent of Russia’s northwest sucking people and capital from the rest of the country Those left behind are thrust into ever deeper isolation Kolesnikova’s family bathes once a month now in bad weather The road is so derelict that no strangers pass through — this much is evident from the rapt stares of her towheaded sons she gave an answer that would resonate with any Russian: The air is clean They gather berries and mushrooms in the summer They produce their own cottage cheese and sour cream when the mud was so deep that “we lived as if we were on an island,” she and her neighbors appealed to the local prosecutor They argued that the state was obliged to keep the roads passable year-round if only for the safety of the last souls who remain in this wood someone important draws attention to the decay of small-town Russia It plays out like this: A visiting dignitary will express public and sputtering rage at the city’s condition a loyal member of his own political team — with a glare like an ice pick The mayor will look at his shoes and remain silent Moral responsibility is in that way transferred downward among the most cherished in Russian political life Most Russians live in housing built in the late Soviet period A report released last year by the Russian Union of Engineers found that 20 percent of city dwellings lack hot water 12 percent have no central heating and 10 percent no indoor plumbing explosions and heating breakdowns happen with increasing frequency but in most places infrastructure is simply edging quietly toward collapse There is a reason for this: Compared with populist steps like raising salaries and pensions spending on infrastructure does little to shore up Mr a sociologist at Moscow’s Independent Institute of Social Policy the Kremlin can always fire a regional official who stepped down two years ago after a dressing-down from the regional governor General Ignatov no longer had any reason to speak diplomatically The money available for repairing heat and water systems “Twelve percent is only enough to patch the holes You choose the most horrible hole out of all the big ones so that people can simply survive the winter.” But the Kremlin has insulated itself from the consequences and what you see is that they are all thieves in the provinces they don’t do anything and don’t want to,” he said the former mayor quoted a line from Pushkin: “Russia will arise from her age-old sleep,” it goes “and our names will be inscribed on the wreckage of despotism.” but it was written 99 years before the October Revolution A traveler who has reached the village of Chernaya Gryaz — the name means “Black Dirt” — can feel the suck of Moscow on his skin So it was for the truck driver Aleksandr Chertkov who cleareyed look of a Soviet monument to the workingman Years spent on Russia’s highways have undermined his faith in just about everything mostly shop workers recruited from provincial cities who waver on high heels on the highway’s shoulder as 18-wheelers blow past for televised police raids on prostitution — footage showing uniformed officers chasing women into birch groves then shoving them out shamefaced to answer a cameraman’s questions Chertkov rolled his eyes at this ritual: A few days pass and the same women are out on the road again They are a sight as permanent as the row of samovars selling tea to truck drivers The road will kill your illusions that way Consider the secondary roads that exist on maps but were never actually built Chertkov’s rig at a dead end in farmland or deep forest Consider the traffic police officers in Dagestan Chertkov refused to pay a 3,000-ruble bribe (about $92) twisted his arms behind his back and made him breathe into a funnel they had fashioned out of paper towels “The Breathalyzer shows that you have been drinking,” he was told something he imagines existed under Stalin He feels envious when he drives through Belarus where the police are too afraid to ask for bribes The Russia he sees from the cab of his truck doesn’t suffer from a lack of freedom; it suffers from a lack of control “There is no master in the house,” he said of Russia’s leaders but it’s as if they live somewhere abroad and come here to work enriching itself and epitomizing his complaints about the direction the country is taking Chertkov washed the grease off his thick hands and hauled himself up into the cab of his truck and pulled away as his rig merged with traffic from the airport Maybe it was time to check out for a season park his rig in his native village where people are simpler and more virtuous Put his keys on the shelf and do nothing until the spring But these were the idle thoughts of a man moving at full speed in the direction of the Kremlin On the right he passed one of Russia’s largest shopping malls and a high wall of housing blocks that are home to some 8,000 new arrivals This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page dog experts of the State Border Guard Service visited the Center for Specialized Training of the Border Guard of the Republic of Poland The visit took place within the framework of the PDP-V project “Strengthening the protection of EU borders through the development of dog training activities reconstruction and modernization of the infrastructure of the Training Center in the city co-financed from the budget of the Norwegian Financial Mechanism in partnership with the State Fiscal Service Ukrainian dog breeders acted as experts in the “II International Kennel Competitions” with the participation of border guards of Poland during which they determined the best specialists with dogs in certain nominations Ukrainian dog breeders exchanged experience with European colleagues on training dog trainers with service dogs and summed up the results of cooperation within the project We use cookies to provide you with better navigation on our website you automatically agree to the use of these technologies sample photo  / Аператыўнае камандаванне УСУ "Поўдзень" / Telegram The Flagshtok (flagstaff) website writes that in the morning in the Kastrychnitski district of the Homiel region they saw and heard the flight of two Russian Shaheds One of them may have fallen and exploded near the village of Zaazerye Emergency Situations Ministry officers and specialists in the area They are looking for the crash site," the publication quoted its source as saying The monitoring group "Belaruski Hayun" confirms that a drone which entered Belarusian airspace at 8:40 a.m yesterday crashed and exploded in the Kastrychnitski district the drone fell between the town of Parychy and the village of Lyuban in the Homiel region which is 55 km from the city of Babruisk and 120 km from the border with Ukraine," clarifies "Belaruski Hayun" The Tg channel clarifies that the drone exploded during the fall This confirms that the Russian drones flying over Belarus are not training or reconnaissance drones They have ammunition and are intended for attacks on Ukraine's territory Become a journalist!Report topic! 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