Financial Times: Valdai Club meeting moved from Sochi to Moscow region over threat of Ukrainian strikes

Filed 37m ago · Via Meduza · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

The Path of the Goblin King

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Diplomatic Security Service from Washington, D.C., United St · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The Valdai discussion club, an annual gathering of Russian officials and sympathetic foreign guests, has quietly moved its meeting from Sochi to the Moscow region, the Financial Times reports. Sources say invitations originally named Sochi, but organizers switched the venue in late August after Russia's Federal Protective Service intervened.

The meeting, themed around 'Responsibility for the Future,' will run outside Moscow from September 28 to October 1. The FT notes that Vladimir Putin, who once visited his Sochi residence two dozen times a year, has been there only twice in the past two years, most recently for last year's Valdai session.

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly hit Russia's Black Sea coast, including an oil refinery in Sochi, and a September 9 drone attack on the Sochi waterfront injured roughly 30 people. The relocation, per the FT, is one more data point on how far Ukrainian strikes now reach into Russian territory.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When the man who owns a beach house won't go near the beach, that tells you something the seating chart never will. A conference about limitless possibility moving because of a very concrete limit is the kind of irony that writes itself. Nobody had to spin this one; the map did the talking.

Source: Read the original at Meduza → Scored: The Path of the Goblin King · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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