The Kremlin has "strongly" rejected an assessment by five European countries that the Russian state killed jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny by poisoning him. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's fiercest domestic opponent for years, died in an Arctic prison colony on February 16, 2024 while serving a 19-year sentence for "extremism", a charge he and his supporters said was punishment for his opposition work. "We naturally do not accept such accusations. We consider them biased and baseless," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a daily briefing call on Monday. "In fact, we strongly reject them," he added.

Navalny's widow has moral authority but nowhere near his political skills. "All these… liberal figures have extremely low approval ratings," says academic Tatiana Stanovaya. Instead, she detects a consolidation of support for the Kremlin which she links to a surge in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia. "People see that we are very vulnerable and they have to choose the strongest player to rely on," the analyst explains. "It's not because they like Putin or consider him a positive hero. It's because he can protect Russia in a very hostile environment."

The Russian government still has a strong influence on Telegram despite lifting a ban last year. RadioFreeEurope reports Telegram has temporarily blocked all of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's Telegram chat bots during voting in the country's parliamentary election this weekend. Company founder Pavel Durov said Telegram would obey an election law barring campaigning during elections, calling the law "legitimate." The move comes despite the nature of the bots and Durov's past statements. One of the bots, Smart Voting, was only meant to identify candidates that could unseat the dominant United Russia party, not just Navalny's Russia of the Future party.

A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls. Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia's parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted. "Putin's Kremlin is so weak and frightened of the strength of @navalny they're conducting fake meetings to discredit the Navalny team," Tugendhat posted in a tweet, referring to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. "They got through to me today. They won't broadcast the bits where I call Putin a murderer and thief, so I'll put it here."

Russia likes to boast of its robots - but at the same time it seems to have a somewhat troubled relationship with them. It has endured a series of very public robotic mishaps, but all is not lost. Amid much fanfare and praise for the Roscosmos space agency, Russian robot Fedor was launched into space on board a Soyuz 14 spacecraft in August. Fedor made history as the first such robot ever to be sent into space by Russia, and within moments he was reporting on his progress and all was apparently going to plan.But then, mission control in Houston broke the news that Fedor's attempt to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) had to be aborted because of a technical problem. To be fair to Fedor, he was not to blame. Despite state media touting him as a major breakthrough, and other incorrect reports suggesting that he was piloting the spacecraft, he did little but talk.