Negotiations between Moscow and NATO, the withdrawal of CSTO forces from Kazakhstan. The main thing for the night – RBK

The peacekeeping mission of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Kazakhstan has been successfully completed, the withdrawal of forces will begin on January 13, said President Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev. The withdrawal process of the contingent will take no more than 10 days.

• Tokayev appealed to the CSTO for support on January 5. Since the beginning of January, protests have been going on in the republic over the rise in gas prices, which quickly escalated into armed riots and clashes with the security forces. In the largest city of the country – Alma-Ata – protesters seized including the regional administration, the presidential residence and the airport, after which marauders appeared in the city. Tokayev stated that terrorist forces took advantage of the situation.
• The CSTO responded with consent to Tokayev’s request. Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan sent their peacekeepers to Kazakhstan to protect infrastructure facilities.

Writer, publicist and playwright Viktor Shenderovich (recognized as a foreign media agent) announced that he had decided to leave Russia. According to him, this decision was caused by a criminal case threatening him at the suit of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin because of Shenderovich’s words on Echo of Moscow in April 2021.

• Prigozhin filed a libel suit against Shenderovich, the editor-in-chief of Echo Moskvy, Alexei Venediktov, and the founders of the radio station. He demanded to remove information about Shenderovich’s statements from public access, refute them and collect 5 million rubles from him and the founders of Echo of Moscow. compensation for moral damage.

The average passing score of the Unified State Exam for admission to full-time budget programs of universities in 2021 decreased in Russia by 0.5 points, according to the HSE report. The decrease in the average passing score on the exam occurred for the first time in 10 years. At the same time, the trend did not affect Moscow and St. Petersburg universities, where the average passing score has only been growing in recent years.

• The authors of the report explain this by the fact that last year the Ministry of Education and Science allocated more budget places mainly to regional universities. That is, those applicants who had not previously passed the points competition were able to enter the budget. This did not affect paid admission – in the country in 2021 compared to 2020, the average score increased by 0.4, in regions without Moscow and St. Petersburg by 0.3.

• Structures of AFK Sistema of Vladimir Yevtushenkov are negotiating the purchase of Home Credit Bank, sources told RBC. These negotiations are close to completion, but now they are influenced by the situation in Kazakhstan, where the bank’s subsidiary operates.
• The suspicion of the emergence of a “deltacron” – a Cypriot combination of two Sars-Cov-2 strains, “delta” and “omicron” – could have arisen as a result of contamination of a sample for sequencing, said Maria van Kerkhove, head of the technical group of the WHO Emergency Diseases Unit. The same point of view was previously expressed by the expert of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare Kamil Khafizov.
• The President of the European Parliament David Sassoli, who has been in a hospital in Italy since the end of December, has died. The cause of his death was complications that arose after a malfunction of the immune system. Sassoli was 65 years old.