On July 16, the American whistleblower applied for temporary asylum in Russia, but his application could take up to three months to process. Russian officials have slammed US ‘double standards’ over routinely disregarding Moscow’s extradition requests of suspected terrorists and criminals. Representatives from Russia’s Ministry of Interior and the prosecutor general’s office issued separate... 

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said that it has been “at least bewildered” by the release of a book by a former Chechen militant Ilyas Akhmadov in the US. The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that Ilyas Akhmadov “passing himself off as the Foreign Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria is in fact a former militant who served as an aide for the international terrorist [Shamil] Basayev.”...