-Turkey's gas imports from Russia fall 35% in 2019

Turkey’s natural gas imports from Russia in 2019 decreased year-on-year by 35%, Russia’s energy company Gazprom announced last week.

Gazprom said the company's natural gas exports to Western Europe in 2019 also decreased by 9% compared to 2018 and fell to 147.4 billion cubic meters.

The gas giant exported 29 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Turkey in 2017, but this fell to 24 billion cubic meters in 2018.

Experts believe the reason for the drop in Russian exports to Turkey is partly because of the slowdown in the Turkish economy in 2019, while also taking into account the fact that the unit price of Russian gas deliveries to Turkey is higher than other source countries, like Azerbaijan.

-Russia fines Facebook and Twitter

The Russian court fined social media sites Facebook and Twitter a total of 8 million rubles on the grounds that they did not comply with legislation protecting personal data.

Lawsuits filed by the Russian Federal Information Technologies and Mass Communication Supervision Agency (Roskomnadzor) against Facebook and Twitter were brought before the Taganskiy Court in the capital Moscow last week.

The court ruled that Twitter and Facebook did not comply with legislation for the protection of personal data, and fined 4 million rubles (approximately $62,800) to each of the social media sites.

Roskomnadzor filed a lawsuit against Facebook and Twitter last month on the grounds that Russian users did not comply with the decision to keep their databases on servers on Russian territory.

Access to professional social networking site LinkedIn in Russia was banned in 2016 under the same legislation.