Mari El

At the II Forum of Finno-Ugric Peoples of the Russian Federation in Saransk, the Rector of Mari State University, Mikhail Shvetsov, presented the new Centre for the Study of Uralic Languages, which opened on 1 September.

Hundreds of settlements in Mari El were left without electricity and nine people were killed, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations said. The disaster has received worldwide coverage.

Esa-Jussi Salminen's book Sankarimatkailijan Marinmaa ja Udmurtia ("An Adventurer's Mari El and Udmurtia") was recently published in Finland. This was announced by the author on Facebook and VKontakte.

A court in Mari El's Yoshkar-Ola district has fined local blogger Andrei Filippov 1.8 million roubles (nearly 18 thousand euros) for a video about the war in Ukraine. The blogger was convicted of spreading "fakes" to incite hatred against the Russian army.

The Mari youth movement has started collecting signatures in Mari El to change the national emblem and formally reintroduce the former emblem. To date, 300 signatures have been collected.