Russia's ambassador to the UK tells ‘RT’ that ‘RT’ is the UK's 2nd-most popular TV network Meanwhile in Russia, on Friday, February 12, 2016

• Police briefly detained a liberal opposition leader today, accusing him of stashing illegal firearms in his car. (They didn't find any.)
  
• The head of Russia's powerful Federal Investigative Committee says the US has been waging a “hybrid war” against the former USSR for the past 20 years.
• Supporters of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov are asking Moscow city officials to let them march in his honor on the one-year anniversary of his murder.
• A website designed to help Russian Internet users circumvent censorship has bowed to regulators' demands and removed a set of instructions for getting around blocked Web content. 
• Russia's ambassador to the UK wrote a love note to the Kremlin-controlled news network RT, proclaiming it the second-most loved TV network in Britain.
• Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman has invested $200 million in the American taxi service Uber.
  

Your license, registration, and firearms, please

Opposition activist and politician Ilya Yashin was briefly detained today in Moscow by traffic police, who claimed to have information that he was carrying illegal firearms in the trunk of his car. Yashin tweeted a photograph of the Interior Ministry officer who stopped him on the road. In the photo, it's clear that Lieutenant-Colonel Vadim Vishnyakov's badge expired yesterday, February 11.

Yashin accused the police of using the gun possession suspicion as a pretext for searching his car for advance copies of his forthcoming report on Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal leader of Chechnya.

Yashin recently traveled to Grozny, in Chechnya, where he tweeted a number of selfies in front of government buildings. Grozny is the capital of Yashin-hatred, judging by a mass demonstration last month, when thousands of Chechens assembled at the urging of the local authorities to shout slogans and carry signs lambasting Yashin and his motley crew of CIA-trained color revolutionaries.

The US isn't to blame for all that's wrong today—it's to blame for all that's wrong in the past 20 years!

Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia's Federal Investigative Committee, said today that Russia and other states of the former USSR have spent the past 20 years in a “hybrid war (economic, political, and informational), launched by the US with the support of a number of countries.” He added that this war has transitioned to the stage of open confrontation more recently. 

Bastrykin accused the United States of driving down the price of oil, wrecking the ruble, and drowning the world in dollars. He also credited Western sanctions with “purposefully striking at the most sensitive sectors of the Russian economy.”

“Justice,” Bastrykin said, is another casualty of this hybrid war. He accuses Western states of abandoning “all possible universal principles and standards of evidence” by charging Russian state officials with criminal activity. In a completely unrelated matter, Bastrykin is rumored to be on a classified American sanctions list, established under the so-called “Magnitsky Act.”

Marching for Boris, one year later

Leaders in Russia's liberal opposition have formally applied for a permit to hold a march in honor of the late Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in Moscow on February 27, 2015. Demonstrators are asking the city to hold their event on the one-year anniversary of the killing, with as many as 50,000 participants. 

Oppositionists would like to hold the march in downtown Moscow, crossing over the bridge where Nemtsov was gunned down. Until a permit is issued by the city, the question is whether officials will insist on a route and venue that are “less disruptive” to traffic patterns. Disagreements about time and place have often plagued negotiations between demonstrators and the city, in the past.

Have it your way, Internet censors 

The website Roskomsvoboda has removed instructions about how to circumvent online censorship, which had earned the group a spot on the Russian government's Internet blacklist. In response, the state censor promised to unban the website. 

Roskomsvoboda replaced its instructions with a republication of findings by the Ministry of Communications, which, in the group's opinion, “confirms the fact that the information disseminated by [this] online resource does not violate the laws of the Russian Federation.” (Indeed, according to the Communications Ministry, there's no definition of “website-anonymizers” or “proxy servers” in existing Russian legislation.)

Question (the ratings) more!

Russia's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alexander Yakovenko, declared in an interview published today that the Kremlin-controlled news network RT is the second-most popular television station in the UK. His comments came in an interview with RT. “I would say that RT is the second-watched TV today in UK,” Yakovenko said, adding that the “BBC is still number one [...] because through the years you got used to this channel.” He offered no evidence for the claim, concrete or otherwise.

According to the most recent data from the Broadcasters Audience Research Board, RT captured 0.03 percent of the UK market in the last week of January. The market share for BBC News was 0.98 percent, Sky News had 0.68 percent, and even the English version of Al Jazeera grabbed twice as many viewers as RT, attracting 0.06 percent of the market.

Uber gets some of that sweet, sweet Russian oligarch cash

The investment holding group LetterOne, which manages assets owned by billionaire Mikhail Fridman and his partners, has invested $200 million in the taxi service Uber. 

Uber has encountered regulatory obstacles in Moscow, where local officials have threatened to ban the service, if it doesn't agree to accept certain limitations that would make it more similar to traditional taxi services.