I. U.S. and Russian priorities for the bilateral agenda

Nuclear security:

• Russia submitted its 2015 civilian plutonium report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, reporting 55.4 tons of civilian plutonium. This includes 53.1 tons of material in storage, 1.5 tons of plutonium in unirradiated MOX and 0.8 tons of plutonium stored elsewhere. The numbers in 2014 were 52, 0.3 and 1.3 tons respectively for atotal of 53.6 tons. (International Panel on Fissile Materials, 09.23.16)
• U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration in cooperation with Poland, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency has successfully repatriated 61 kg of Russian-origin highly enriched uranium from the Maria Research Reactor located in Otwock-Swierk, Poland. The shipment removes the last known HEU from Poland, making Poland the 31st country plus Taiwan to become HEU-free. (U.S. Department of Energy, 09.26.16)
• The Russian town of Ozersk, home to the Mayak nuclear facility, held public hearings on Sept. 19 on the planned shipment of spent fuel from the VVR-K reactor in Kazakhstan. According to a preliminary environmental impact assessment, Russia is planning to transfer 504 kg of the spent fuel in three shipments. (IPFM, 09.29.16)
• A unified global front is urgently needed to prevent terrorist groups like ISIS from obtaining nuclear weapons, Kazakhstan's foreign minister has said. (Jordan Times, 09.24.16)
• India will host a meeting on combating nuclear terrorism in New Delhi in February of next year. This will be a gathering of the Implementation and Assessment Group of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. (TheWire.in, 09.29.16)

Iran’s nuclear program and related issues:

• Iran supplied 38 tons of heavy water to Russia in September, the head of the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom, Sergey Kirienko, said at the 60th Annual Regular Session of the IAEA General Conference in Vienna. (Tass, 09.26.16)

Military issues, including NATO-Russia relations:

• In a speech on Monday U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter implicitly rejected arguments for eliminating any element of the nuclear force or scaling back a modernization plan. Carter accused Russia of “nuclear saber-rattling” and argued that even though the Cold War is long over, nuclear weapons are still needed to deter Russia and other potential aggressors from thinking they could get away with a nuclear attack. He said the Pentagon plans to spend $108 billion over the next five years to sustain and improve its nuclear force. In response to the speech the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday issued a strongly worded statement accusing the Pentagon of nurturing an aggressive nuclear strategy threatening Russia. (Associated Press, 09.26.16, 09.29.16)
• The Icelandic Foreign Ministry said three Tupolev bombers flew 1,800-2,700 meters below a commercial airliner flying from Reykjavik to Stockholm on Sept. 22. The bombers' transponders were turned off. A Russian diplomat in Reykjavik, Aleksei Shadsky, said the bombers complied with international rules and Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the bombers were flying at a safe distance. (The Guardian, 09.26.16; AP, 09.27.16)
• Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton expressed doubts about whether the United States should go forward with a trillion-dollar modernization of its nuclear forces at a fund-raiser in February, questioning an Obama administration plan that she has remained largely silent on in public. “The last thing we need,” she told the audience, “are sophisticated cruise missiles that are nuclear armed.” The United States, Clinton said, needs to “do everything we can” to restrain the competitions, including exploring new treaties with Moscow that would go beyond the New START treaty of 2010. (New York Times, 09.29.16)
• During her first debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Sept. 26 Clinton pledged to support U.S. allies, including those on NATO's eastern flank who are worried about Russia’s annexation of Ukraine's Crimea territory in 2014 and its backing of armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. (RFE/RL, 09.27.16)
• "I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over," Trump said when asked during the Sept. 26 presidential debate to comment on reports that President Barack Obama is considering changing longstanding U.S. nuclear policy by declaring a "No First Use" rule. “At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can't take anything off the table," he said. Clinton, in her answer to the question about No First Use, didn't say she was for or against it. (Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• Trump has complained during the campaign that some NATO countries aren't spending enough on defense and that the U.S. is shouldering a disproportionate share of the cost. But during his first presidential debate with Clinton on Sept. 26, he said he was "all for it." "We have to get NATO to go into the Middle East with us in addition to surrounding nations and we have to knock the hell out of ISIS and we have to do it fast," Trump said. Trump also vowed to strengthen NATO during a campaign event Wednesday in Chicago. (Wall Street Journal, 09.27.16; Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• The head of NATO on Tuesday defended the alliance against Trump's claims it isn't focused enough on terrorism and rejected the notion it was creating a key position in response to his criticism. Trump has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and said the alliance has been overly concerned with Russia, rather than what he said is the more urgent threat of terrorism. (Wall Street Journal, 09.27.16)
• “Russia has been expanding their—they have a much newer capability than we do. We have not been updating from the new standpoint,” Trump said about Russian and U.S. nuclear programs during the Sept. 26 debate with Clinton. (CBS News, 09.29.16)

Missile defense:

• No significant developments.

Nuclear arms control:

• The Pentagon has released the latest number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. While during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. reached a peak of 31,255 weapons in its stockpile in 1967, it had 4,571 weapons in 2015—down from 4,717 a year earlier. (International Business Times, 09.27.16)

Counter-terrorism:

• With an estimated 2,400 of its citizens fighting with ISIS, Russia is surpassed only by Tunisia and Saudi Arabia in the number of its nationals in the extremist group’s ranks, according to Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute. (War on the Rocks, 09.23.16)
• A former prize-winning wrestler from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan has reportedly been killed by a drone in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The death of Chamsulvara Chamsulvarayev, who was killed while riding in a car with five Islamic State fighters, has been confirmed by ISIS members. The other men have been identified as Mukhammad Akhmedov, a cleric from Dagestan; Abu Dzhabir Medinsky, reportedly from Russia's Karachayevo-Cherkessia region; Adbullah Dzhay; Abdulkhamid Shishani and a man called Yusuf. (Caucasian Knot/BBC, 09.29.16)
• A court in Kyrgyzstan's southern city of Osh has jailed four men after convicting them of membership in the Islamic State extremist group. (RFE/RL, 09.29.16)
• The wife of Ibrahim Todashev, an ethnic Chechen who was shot and killed by FBI agents as they questioned him about one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, has been charged with making a false statement. A federal indictment filed in Atlanta last week said that Reniya Manukyan lied to a federal investigator looking into bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. (RFE/RL, 09.29.16)

Cyber security:

• FBI Director James Comey told Congress there have been more "attempted intrusions" into U.S. voter registration databases and the agency is looking "very, very hard" at Russian hackers who may be trying to disrupt the U.S. election. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the country does not interfere with U.S. elections "because we respect the Americans” and that Russia is interested in cooperation with the U.S. on hacker attacks blamed on Russians. (Tass, 09.29.16; RFE/RL, 09.29.16; Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• U.S. officials are increasingly confident that the hacker Guccifer 2.0 is part of a network of individuals and groups kept at arm's length by Russia to mask its involvement in cyber intrusions such as the theft of thousands of Democratic Party documents, according to people familiar with the matter. (Wall Street Journal, 09.28.16)
• A top-ranking Democratic lawmaker says intelligence officials have reached a “clear consensus” that the Russian government was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails earlier this year. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Sept. 28 that the FBI should investigate whether Russia is working to undermine the U.S. presidential election. (AP, 09.28.16)
• “There's no doubt now that Russia has used cyber-attacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this,” Hillary Clinton said during the first presidential debate with Donald Trump. She also accused Trump of having "publicly invited" Russian President Vladimir Putin to hack American targets. “This is one of [Russia's] preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information," Clinton said. In response Trump said: “She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don't—maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China.” (RFE/RL, 09.27.16; Fortune, 09.26.16)
• Yahoo Inc. executives detected hackers in their systems in fall 2014 who they believed were linked to Russia and were seeking data on 30 to 40 specific users of the company's online services, said a person familiar with the matter. Yahoo said the information was stolen from its network in late 2014 by a "state-sponsored actor." (Wall Street Journal, 09.24.16)
• ''We have the information, but nobody contacted us,'' said Vladimir Fomenko, who runs a computer-server business out of a rented apartment in the Russian town of Biysk. Fomenko was recently identified by an American cybersecurity company, ThreatConnect, as the manager of an ''information nexus'' that was used by hackers suspected of working for Russian state security in cyberattacks on democratic processes in several countries, including Germany, Turkey and Ukraine, as well as the United States. Fomenko does not deny that hackers used his servers, but does deny knowing that they did until Sept. 15. (New York Times, 09.28.16)
• It appears that the globally trending #TrumpWon began in Russia—specifically, in St. Petersburg. When Adrian Chen of the New York Times explored the world of online Russian trolls, his search brought him back to an office building in that city. (Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• Russian government hackers began targeting British citizen journalist Eliot Higgins in February 2015, eight months after he began posting evidence documenting alleged Russian government involvement in the shoot-down of a Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine. (Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• Moscow city authorities will replace Microsoft Corp. programs with domestic software on thousands of computers in answer to President Vladimir Putin’s call for Russia’s authorities to reduce dependence on foreign technology amid tensions with the U.S. and Europe. (Bloomberg, 09.27.16)
• The Russian government has commissioned the Federal Security Service (FSB) to develop a system by which to punish state officials caught using uncertified applications like WhatsApp for work correspondence. (The Moscow Times, 09.30.16)
• The Kremlin has already begun work on plans to monitor and decrypt Russia's online traffic in real-time, the Kommersant newspaper has reported. (The Moscow Times, 09.26.16)

Energy exports:

• Russia, the world’s largest energy exporter, is on course to pump a post-Soviet record amount of oil in September. Russian crude and condensate production is set to average 11.1 million barrels a day this month, compared with 10.7 million barrels a day in August. That would surpass the 10.9 million barrels a day January production level. (Bloomberg, 09.28.16)
• Russia will find mechanisms and instruments needed to freeze oil production should the country reach an agreement with OPEC on limiting output, the Russian energy minister said on Sept. 30. Oil futures fell that day as investors cashed in their recent gains and skepticism grew over a tentative agreement to cut production among members of OPEC. Russia is sticking with an assumption that oil will average $40 a barrel in the next three years and won’t revise its budget outlook after a preliminary agreement by OPEC on its first production cut in eight years, according to Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. (Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, 09.30.16)
• Gazprom received a survey work permit for two lines of the offshore segment of the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline in Turkey’s territorial waters, the Russian gas holding said on Sept. 29. (Tass, 09.29.16)
• Russian authorities have announced an auction for the Nazymsky and Ai-Yaunsky oilfield production sites in the Khanty-Mansyisk Autonomous Region. Both need processing techniques that are only available abroad, opening up the possibility that local companies may partner with foreign firms to win the rights. (RBTH, 09.28.16)
• The U.K. is about to receive its first American shale gas. (Bloomberg, 09.27.16)

Bilateral economic ties:

• The owner of Russia’s S7 Airlines has agreed to buy the floating rocket platform Sea Launch from a group of investors and aims to restore its operations after a more-than-two-year hiatus, the family-owned company said. S7 faces significant challenges in trying to revive Sea Launch, which was created by Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian companies and Boeing in 1995. (Bloomberg, 09.27.16)

Other bilateral issues:

• U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly trying to establish whether businessman Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has held private discussions with senior Russian officials on bilateral issues, including U.S. sanctions. "All of these accusations are just complete garbage," Page said. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and unnamed intelligence officials have suggested that on a July trip to Moscow, Page met with "highly sanctioned individuals.” (RFE/RL, 09.24.16, Washington Post, 09.26.16)
• In the Sept. 26 presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton voiced her longstanding suspicion of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he is "playing a really tough, long game here." (Wall Street Journal, 09.28.16)
• A lawyer for Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who is serving a 20-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug smuggling, says his client has signed a form authorizing his extradition to Russia. (RFE/RL, 09.27.16)
• A police officer in St. Petersburg stands accused of being an American spy. Sergey Kulakov came to the attention of the Federal Security Service (FSB) while acting as a handler in a sting operation targeting a company owned by businessman Igor Khotin. In pictures on MySpace, a man resembling Kulakov appears dressed in the uniform of the U.S. Army’s 519th Military Intelligence Battalion (The Moscow Times, 09.29.16)
• Only 24 percent of registered American voters say Vladimir Putin has leadership qualities that would be good for an American president to share, while 71 percent say he does not. In fact, a majority, 56 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of Putin, while only 10 percent said they view the Russian leader favorably, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. Four in 10 Trump supporters and only 1 in 10 Clinton supporters say Putin has leadership qualities that would be good for an American president to have. (Associated Press, 09.25.16)
• Russia may jail its own separatists, but that did not hinder a nominally independent Russian organization from laying out the welcome mat on Sunday for an oddball, global troupe of liberation movements, including, improbably, four from the United States. (New York Times, 09.26.16)

II. Russia’s domestic news

Politics, economy and energy:

• Together with state-owned companies, the Russian state’s share in the country’s GDP rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 70 percent in 2015. (The Moscow Times, 09.29.16)
• Over a third of Russians receiving the national minimum wage are state employees, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets has said. (The Moscow Times, 09.28.16)
• Rosatom’s director general Sergey Kirienko is reportedly Vladimir Putin's top choice to replace Vyacheslav Volodin, who for the past four-odd years has served as the Kremlin's first deputy chief of staff, overseeing domestic political affairs and “managing” the country's elections. (The Moscow Times, 09.25.16)
• Two top leadership bodies of the ruling United Russia party have endorsed five lawmakers—Alexander Zhukov, Vladimir Vasilyev, Sergei Neverov, Irina Yarovaya and Piotr Tolstoy—as prospective deputy speakers in the recently elected State Duma, parliament's lower house. (Interfax, 09.24.16)
• Proposed legislation would see all Russian citizens living abroad classified as “permanent financial residents” and obliged to provide Russia’s Finance Ministry with details of foreign earnings and bank accounts, the RBC news website reported Sept. 27. (The Moscow Times, 09.27.16)

Defense and aerospace:

• The Vladimir Monomakh, Russia’s newest nuclear-armed submarine, has reached its permanent base at Viluchinsk on the Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula. It is Russia’s third Borei-class submarine and is armed with 16 Bulava submarine-launched intercontinental nuclear missiles. (RFE/RL, 09.26.16)
• A Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile fired by a Russian nuclear submarine has exploded, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced in a statement on Sept. 27. Two missiles were fired from the submarine during a training exercise in the White Sea, with one blowing up after completing the first part of its flight. (The Moscow Times, 09.28.16)
• Russia’s Tactical Missiles Corporation hopes to create a weapon that would be able to hit targets at hypersonic speeds by the early 2020s, according to a statement by the corporation’s general director Boris Obnosov. (RBTH, 09.27.16)
• Southern Military District Chief of Staff and First Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. Andrei Serdyukov may take charge of the Airborne Forces, the newspaper Izvestia said on Sept. 30. Incumbent Airborne Forces Commander Col. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov has been elected to parliament's lower house. He is expected to head the State Duma's Defense Committee. (Interfax, 09.30.16)

Security, law enforcement and justice:

• Russia's Supreme Court has upheld a decision by a Moscow-backed Crimean court to ban the Mejlis, the self-governing body of Crimean Tatars in Ukraine's occupied territory of Crimea. (RFE/RL, 09.29.16)
• Thirteen Russian nationals have been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking. The men, who hail from Russia's republic of Chechnya, allegedly smuggled migrants from Vietnam into the European Union via Russia. (The Moscow Times, 09.27.16)

III. Foreign affairs and trade

Syria:

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sept. 29 that the U.S. is “on the verge” of ending Syria talks with Russia. Kerry said the U.S. has no indication of Russia’s “seriousness of purpose.” The State Department said Kerry issued an ultimatum to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a telephone call the day before. According to a U.S. government statement, Kerry “made it clear” that the U.S. holds Russia responsible for the grave humanitarian situation in Aleppo and accused Russia, along with the Syrian regime it supports, of carrying out airstrikes on “hospitals, the water supply network, and other civilian infrastructure.” Kerry said the ongoing Aleppo bombing was "beyond the pale of any notion, strategic or otherwise," and "completely against the laws of war." (NBC News, 09.29.16; RFE/RL, Moscow Times, 09.28.16; Washington Post, 09.30.16)
• Russia’s Foreign Ministry has called the U.S. threat to end joint cooperation in Syria “blackmail.” This undermining of the anti-terrorist operation in Syria, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed, “can only be characterized as de-facto support of terrorists by the current U.S. administration.” Contacts between Russia and the U.S. over Syria were not cut as of Sept. 29, according to Russia’s Foreign Ministry. (Tass, The Moscow Times, 09.29.16)
• Ryabkov said Sept.29 that Moscow advocated a "48-hour pause" in the fighting in Aleppo to allow in aid but added that a longer cessation of hostilities would allow militant groups arrayed against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to reorganize. (Wall Street Journal, 09.29.16)
• Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said it’s hard to end the fighting when the al-Qaeda wing in Syria and other groups are “constantly attacking the Syrian armed forces.” Assad’s allied forces will continue their “war with terrorists,” he told reporters in a conference call Sept. 29. (Bloomberg, 09.29.16)
• At a Sept. 28 briefing State Department spokesman John Kirby warned that if Russia doesn’t change its position, then “the consequences are that the civil war will continue in Syria, that extremists and extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria to expand their operations, which will include, no question, attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities, and Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and they will continue to lose resources—even, perhaps, more aircraft.” In comments on her Facebook page, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “Doesn’t it seem that such ventriloquism about ‘bodies in bags’…and the ‘loss of aircraft’ sounds more like ordering a dog to attack, rather than a comment by a diplomat?” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, said in a statement that Mr. Kirby’s comments were “the most frank confession by the U.S. side so far that the whole ‘opposition’ ostensibly fighting a ‘civil war’ in Syria is a U.S.-controlled terrorist international.”( U.S. State Department, 09.28.16; Wall Street Journal, New York Times, 09.29.16)
• U.S. officials are saying Russia will pay a price for its actions in Syria because of the resentment and violence it’s unleashing. “What they are doing is a gift to ISIL and al-Nusra, the groups that they claim that they want to stop,” Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said Sept. 29. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it is the U.S. refusal to cooperate with Russia on Syria that would be a gift to “terrorists.” (Bloomberg, Tass, 09.30.16)
• "There's no support from the White House" for Kerry's diplomatic efforts, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told Kerry's deputy, Antony Blinken. Calling Kerry a "sympathetic figure," Corker said the secretary had been left hanging by a White House unwilling to "roll up sleeves and deal with the tough issues that we have to deal with. . . . Diplomatic actions cannot be backed up, because Russia and Assad realized that there is no Plan B, never has been a Plan B." (Washington Post, 09.30.16)
• Britain, France and the United States have lashed out at Russia for its actions in Syria, amid an intensification of the bombing campaign over the northern city of Aleppo. "What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counterterrorism, it is barbarism," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told an emergency meeting of the Security Council on September 25. "It is difficult to deny that Russia is partnering with the Syrian regime to carry out war crimes," the British envoy, Matthew Rycroft, said. But Russia's representative, Vitaly Churkin, instead blamed his American counterparts for the return to fighting and insisted Assad's forces had shown "admirable restraint." (The Guardian, 09.26.16; Washington Post, 09.26.16)
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to do all he can to improve what Merkel called a "catastrophic humanitarian situation" in Syria. Germany’s foreign minister has also called his Russian counterpart to urge Moscow to support a cease-fire lasting longer than 48 hours in Syria and to put pressure on Damascus to respect any truce. (Associated Press, 09.29.16; RFE/RL, 09.29.16)
• Federica Mogherini, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said Sept. 29 that EU governments were discussing measures that could be taken to respond to the "massacre" in Aleppo, without giving details. (Wall Street Journal, 09.29.16)
• A top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander told Iranian media last week that the Guard and allies supply intelligence to Russia for airstrikes in Syria. Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, who is senior advisor to the supreme leader and was IRGC chief commander from 1997 through 2007, made the remarks in a lengthy television interview Sept. 22. (Long War Journal, 09.27.16)
• Over the past several days, videos have emerged of the Russian Su-25 Frogfoot strike plane supporting the Syrian army in Latakia, proving Moscow has redeployed the deadly aircraft just months after having recalled them. Russian aircraft are hitting civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo with incendiary bombs, cluster munitions and what is thought to be the 1,000-lb BETAB-500 “bunker buster” bomb. (Foreign Policy, 09.26.16)
• The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a year of Russian air strikes has killed more than 9,364 people, including more than 3,800 civilians, in the war-torn country. (RFE/RL, 09.30.16)
• The United States has accused Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of waging a "concerted campaign" against civilians. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Sept. 26 that Syrian government forces, backed by Russian warplanes, were trying "to bomb civilians into submission." His comments came after the Syrian government declared last week a new offensive against opposition rebels in eastern Aleppo. (RFE/RL, 09.26.16)
• If you held up two maps of Syria—one from last September, when Russian forces first intervened in the chaotic civil war there, and one today—you would see that the battle lines look quite similar. (New York Times, 09.25.16)

Other "far abroad" countries and foreign affairs in general:

• Russia and China are close to completing a system for clearing trades that will boost funding options for their companies and governments, according to the head of Russia’s biggest stock exchange. (Bloomberg, 09.26.16)
• The head of the Libyan National Army, Gen. Khalifa Haftar, has asked Moscow to provide his forces with weapons and military hardware, the Izvestia newspaper reported Sept. 28, citing an unidentified Russian diplomatic source. (The Moscow Times, 09.28.16)
• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Sept. 26 he would visit Russia and China this year to chart an independent foreign policy and "open alliances" with two powers with historic rivalries with the United States. (Reuters, 09.26.16)
• Russian is the most popular non-EU language studied by elementary school students in the European Union. (Interfax, 09.26.16)
• A Russian man has been arrested in Warsaw for flying a drone over the offices of the Polish prime minister, Radio Poland reported Sept. 26. (The Moscow Times, 09.27.16)
• Sergey Kirienko, head of Russia's Rosatom nuclear corporation, signed agreements with Cuba, Finland, Jordan and Tunisia this week, covering the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, training and early notification of nuclear accidents. The agreements were signed on the sidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 60th General Conference in Vienna. (World Nuclear News, 09.28.16)

Ukraine:

• A spokesman for the international investigation into the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in 2014 has told a news conference that it was shot down from separatist-held territory in Ukraine with a missile system brought in from and then returned to Russia. The evidence was based on intercepted telephone conversations between separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine, as well as open-source photographs and satellite data, investigators said. The team members said that they had identified more than 100 people linked to the transport of the missile system and that they would seek to identify "who ordered the plane to be shot down." The investigation has been extended into 2018. (RFE/RL, Washington Post, 09.28.16)
• Russian officials have decried the interim results of an international investigation that found that the Malaysian Airlines passenger jet that crashed in eastern Ukraine in July 2014 was shot down by an antiaircraft missile transported from Russia and fired from rebel-controlled territory in Ukraine. And the Russian military claimed that radiolocation data show that the missile that downed the airliner was not fired from territory controlled by Russia-backed rebels. (AP, 09.26.16; RFE/RL, 09.28.16)
• European Union leaders will explore at a summit on Oct. 20-21 the possibility of improving strained ties with Russia in response to growing irritation among some member states over economic sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis. But the sanctions appear likely to remain in place for now, especially those slapped on over Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula seized by Russia in March 2014, despite the legal and political challenges of maintaining them. Countries skeptical about extending sanctions include Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Hungary. European officials said that the recriminations against Moscow in the wake of the Aleppo bombardment will hamper Russian efforts to have Ukraine-related sanctions lifted. (Reuters, 09.26.16; Financial Times, 09.28.16)
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to stabilize a fragile cease-fire in Ukraine. The Kremlin statement said the two discussed the conflict in eastern Ukraine within the framework of "reactivating work for a full implementation of the Minsk agreements." (RFE/RL, 09.29.16)
• Ukraine has marked the 75th anniversary of the World War II-era mass execution of 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine with official remembrances at the killing site on the outskirts of Kiev. (RFE/RL, 09.29.16)

Russia’s other post-Soviet neighbors:

• Tajikistan says China plans to finance and build several outposts for Tajik border guards along the Tajik-Afghan border. (RFE/RL, 09.26.16)
• Kyrgyzstan's parliament has advanced a draft law on holding a nationwide referendum on constitutional amendments. The constitutional changes would widen the powers of the prime minister and parliament and introduce changes to the judicial system. (RFE/RL, 09.30.16)
• Nearly 85% of Azerbaijan's voters supported the extension of the presidential term from five to seven years, with nearly 100% of the ballots counted, Baku's Central Election Commission announced Sept. 27. Earlier, the Venice Commission, a European watchdog of constitutional-law experts, said the measures would weaken political dissent. (RFE/RL, 09.27.16)
• With most voters still undecided on the eve of Georgia's parliamentary elections, a mysterious audio recording has surfaced that is apparently intended to smear former President Mikheil Saakashvili and his party. The country's State Security Service is investigating whether its contents constitute a coup attempt. (RFE/RL, 09.30.16)
• Russian customs officials have noted a particularly “miraculous” apple yield in Belarus, a country that managed to sell Russia five times more apples than it officially harvested. Law-enforcement agencies have blamed the discrepancy in the 2015 figures on forged documents used to smuggle sanctioned European produce over the Belarusian-Russian border (The Moscow Times, 09.30.16)

News items for this digest curated by Simon Saradzhyan, director of the Russia Matters Project.