TODAY: Putin meets bomb victims in Volgograd, gives two New Year’s speeches; Strategy 31 protesters detained; adoption agreement with U.S. lapses; Orthodox academic sacked over blog posts; Pozner receives French honour; Tolokonnikova models for brand website.

President Vladimir Putin flew to Volgograd to meet the victims of this week’s double suicide bombings and to discuss security, as ‘dozens’ were detained as part of an anti-terror sweep in the city where police searched hundreds of people.  The President also visited the site of the second bombing, and made his first public comments on the attacks during his New Year’s message, in which he promised to hunt down those responsible until they are ‘completely annihilat[ed]’.  Thanks to what presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov called a ‘rare malfunction’, two different New Year’s speeches were broadcast, one mentioning the attacks, and the other, recorded before the incident had happened, making more general statements about security and friendship. RIA Novosti either failed to get the memo, or was giving Putin the benefit of the doubt.  Transcripts of both speeches are available here.  What is the hardest thing about being a gay parent raising a child in Russia? ‘[T]he feeling that you are never safe.’