Are you gonna believe Ramzan Kadyrov's spokesman, or your lying eyes? Meanwhile in Russia, on Tuesday, February 9, 2016

• Moscow woke up today to rubble and dust surrounding several of its most trafficked metro stations. The city has bulldozer fever, and the only prescription is demolishing small businesses.
• In the spirit of Matthew 21:12, the Russian Orthodox Church wants to drive out the entrepreneurs and set up its own shops at the newly cleared spaces in Moscow.
• Ever wonder why the .Ru and .РФ Internet domains attract so many scammy websites? The guy who administers them thinks it's because they're so cheap to register.
• Ramzan Kadyrov's spokesman says you misunderstood what Ramzan Kadyrov said on national television last Sunday.
• A gang of Chechens interrupts and threatens a former prime minister's dinner and life.

Shop until you drop

In the middle of the night, hours before dawn on February 9, several dozen small shops were bulldozed to rubble near multiple Moscow metro stations. Photographs of the demolished “small-business” centers were a sensation on Russian social media. The demolitions took place at multiple metro stations, including Kropotkinskaya, Chistye Prudy, Sokol, Taganskaya, and others. 

City officials say 97 different structures are slated for destruction, and more than half (55) have already been smashed to pieces. In several areas, however, demolition crews have suspended work, due to complications and local traffic.

The secretary of Russia's Civic Chamber (a consultative body in the Russian government) has called for an investigation into the legality of the demolitions, though he says what he witnessed appeared to be legal.

Drop to your knees and say a prayer

Remember those bulldozed small businesses? The Russian Orthodox Church says it would like to build churches where they stood. The chairman of the “Patriarchal Commission for Family Affairs, Motherhood, and Childhood” says Russian Orthodox churches in Moscow are overcrowded and new real estate is hard to come by. “The more churches there are, the fewer prisons [we will need],” he said, quoting Patriarch Alexy II.

A domain of thieves

Andrei Vorobyev, the head of the Coordination Center for the .Ru and .РФ Top-Level Domains, says these domains attract crime because it's they're so cheap and because of “liberal registration” rules. Vorobyev says Russia's domains are the least expensive in Europe, costing roughly 600 rubles ($7.59) a year, compared to 890 rubles ($11.26) for a .com registration, 990 rubles ($12.53) for .net, and 1,990 rubles ($25.18) for .org.

Are you gonna believe Kadyrov's spokesman, or your lying eyes?

Alvi Karimov, Ramzan Kadyrov's spokesman, is walking back the Chechen ruler's comments about Chechen special forces conducting covert operations on the ground in Syria. According to Karimov, Kadyrov never said anything about any “Chechen special forces,” specifying that Russia isn't participating in any ground war in Syria. Karimov says any Chechen fighters now in Syria “are there exclusively on their own initiative,” echoing what Vladimir Putin has said about Russian combatants in eastern Ukraine. “No one sent them there,” Karimov told reporters today.

In a television appearance on Sunday, February 7, Ramzan Kadyrov told the news channel Vesti, “Special forces agents from Chechnya were embedded [in Syrian extremist training camps]. In Russia, they didn't know it yet, but I already knew what ISIL would be called. I sent my own people there specifically for this [...].”

A gang of Chechens interrupts, threatens a former prime minister's dinner, life

Today at a restaurant in Moscow, “roughly 20 Chechens” attacked former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who now leads the opposition party Parnas. Some of the men reportedly threw cake at him, while shouting death threats, Kasyanov told the news agency Interfax. 

The men suspected of murdering Boris Nemtsov last year also hail from Chechnya, where the republic's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, regularly makes provocative public statements about the need to punish Russia's liberal oppositionists, whom he accuses of being “traitors.”

On February 1, Kadyrov posted on Instagram a photograph of Kasyanov depicted inside what appeared to be the crosshairs of sniper's scope. Kadyrov's spokesman later claimed it was only a periscope sight, but Instagram deleted the post anyway, reportedly saying it violated the company's terms of service.