YEKATERINBURG—In Russia, Yevgeny Roizman is something of an endangered species. With popular opposition leaders often forced into exile or locked behind bars, the career politician is one of very few career politicians left on the front lines, willing to fight against the Kremlin’s all-consuming corruption despite the risks that entails. Throughout his decades-long career, Roizman—who has served as a Duma member in Russia’s parliament and then as mayor of the Ural region’s capital city of Yekaterinburg—has been regarded as one of those rare Russian politicians who does not take bribes and makes time to listen to the concerns of everyday citizens. […]
Anna Nemtsova
60 posts
SAINT PETERSBURG—Millions of mothers are desperate for their daughters to succeed in ballet or gymnastics. But in Russia, it’s a national obsession. The daily stretching, the workouts, the jumping on pointe shoes—all are painful and exhausting routines for young girls, but generations of moms have not eased up, just as their own mothers did not allow them to give up. Many of these mothers, who spend countless amounts of time and money in classes, like to post pictures of their graceful daughters on social media to tell themselves and the rest of the world that all of their hard work was […]
MOSCOW—Russians have been gossiping about Vladimir Putin’s health from the very start of the pandemic—and the Kremlin has always dismissed the flood of rumors as “absolute nonsense.” But on Tuesday, Putin announced that he will be self-isolating due to several COVID-19 infections within his inner circle. The announcement—made by the Russian leader in a phone conversation with his Tajik counterpart, according to a Kremlin readout—came after the typically stone-faced Putin struck a different tone Monday as he admitted that the latest COVID-19 surge is threatening his own inner “circle,” and that he may have to quarantine as a result. Speaking at […]
NIZHNY NOVGOROD—Russia is facing a dire demographic crisis, and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. The country’s dramatic natural population decline in the past six months—more than double the rate from the same time period last year—is so severe that it prompted President Vladimir Putin to come out with a rallying cry in support of larger families last week. “A strong family bringing up two, three, or four children,” he said, “should be the image of a future Russia.” Realizing this goal will be a Herculean task, for many reasons. No matter how conservative the country is made […]
MOSCOW—The newsroom at Dozhd, or TV Rain in English, was buzzing on Monday, three days after the Kremlin had designated the outlet—the only independent TV channel in the country—as a “foreign agent,” casting its future into doubt. Instead of throwing in the towel, the channel’s 170 employees have been determined to carry on despite constant threats, lawsuits and persecutions. As Russia’s only television channel covering national and foreign news without state censorship, its coverage of the Kremlin’s political opposition is all but certainly the cause of its problems today. Russia is in the midst of one of the harshest crackdowns on […]
KYIV, Ukraine—All Russians will be banned from taking part in a huge new selloff of Ukrainian state-owned companies, a senior official has told The Daily Beast. The move is intended to bolster Ukraine’s economy while freeing it from the tentacles of Russian influence on the 30th anniversary of its independence. President Vladimir Putin ordered up to 100,000 troops to the border of Eastern Ukraine earlier this year and Russian investors and pro-Russian oligarchs continue to try and increase their influence on Kyiv. Ahead of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with President Joe Biden in Washington later this month, Ukraine is moving ahead […]
MOSCOW—Russia is on fire. Massive wildfires are wiping out entire Siberian villages, killing people, emitting dangerous smoke, and destroying woods and national parks across over 5 million hectares. The fires, which started in May in Yakutia, are now larger than all wildfires around the planet combined, according to Greenpeace. There is no official death toll yet, but at least five people have died so far. For months, Russian authorities have been saying that the situation was under control. Finally, on Thursday, the minister of Emergency Situations, Yevgeny Zinichev, traveled to the epicenter of the disaster in Yakutia and concluded: the fires […]
MOSCOW—Accusations, police detentions, and court convictions have been raining on Lyubov Sobol, one of Russia’s youngest and most prominent opposition leaders. On Tuesday, a court here ordered the woman who had been Alexei Navalny’s No. 2 to 18 months of house arrest over what authorities called a “sanitary case.” Her crime? The 33-year-old lawyer known for her blond hair and hipster glasses is accused of breaching COVID-19 restrictions by calling on opposition activists to join a peaceful anti-Putin protest to support the imprisoned Navalny back in January. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Sobol said the rash of prosecutions […]
KYIV—In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, famed Ukrainian television presenter and producer Karolina Ashion shared what she describes as the most painful moment of her career: When her former boss—then the director of Ukraine’s 1+1 media conglomerate and current Minister of Culture, Alexander Tkachenko—allegedly told her that her appearance on a popular morning show would hurt the network’s ratings. Ashion is a Black Ukrainian. Her father came to Leningrad, USSR from Nigeria to study engineering. Even now, six years after the incident took place, Ashion is emotional talking about it, and struggles to find the words to describe her […]
MOSCOW—Russian elite have a long-lasting passion for palaces and kitsch interior designs in the fashion of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles. Villa owners love to show off their own versions of glamorous and extravagant style of pre-revolutionary France, overloading homes with golden décor, massive crystal lamps, marble floors and heavy royal staircases. But there is one phenomenon currently inspiring discussions among psychologists, historians and corruption fighters: The post-Soviet obsession with golden toilets. As it turns out, one such golden toilet owner is the head of traffic police in Stavropol region, Colonel Aleksey Safonov, who became the town clown this week after getting arrested […]
MOSCOW—A brutal new wave of repressions began in Belarus on Wednesday after Europe’s last dictator traveled to St. Petersburg to get President Putin’s blessing. Starting at 7 a.m., police stormed the homes and offices of dozens of organizations fighting a rearguard action to defend democracy and a free press. Police interrogated journalists, local and international human rights defenders, confiscated archives, computers and cell phones all across the country in the cities of Minsk, Grodno, Oksha and Brest. On the eve of the “cleansing” operation, the Belarusian dictator of more than 25 years suddenly arrived in Russia to complain to Putin about […]
MOSCOW—The new wave of threats began almost as soon as Violetta Grudina, an opposition politician and a gay rights activist in Russia, declared her candidacy in local elections. It was a dark beginning to an election campaign but hardly a surprising one. Such attacks were not new to Grudina. Once a few years ago, she was pushed down and kicked in her face by a nationalist thug for her “unwomanly” appearance. Last spring, rifle bullets flew through her office window. But this time was different, and it was clear to Grudina that somebody was putting a lot of effort into ending […]
SOCHI, Russia— Giant magnolia flowers cover the trees along the tranquil streets and a fresh breeze from the sea moves the tops of old cypress and palm alleys in the parks. At sunset, SUPs and sailing boats take off into the pink sea. Sochi has long been the best summer destination for generations of Russians. There is hardly a better place to spend the pandemic than in its sub-tropical gardens tucked away between the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea. This year the Russian Miami expected 200,000 tourists—more than in the pre-COVID-19 era—but an unexpected new rule changed the situation overnight. […]
MOSCOW—The U.S. Marine forces trained Catherine Serou to survive in combat, and she did during in the war in Afghanistan. The 6-foot-tall blonde was athletic, hard-working, intellectual, an artist, a photographer and studying law at a Russian university. But it was a car ride in a sleepy provincial Russian town, Bor, in the region of Nizhny Novgorod that she did not survive: after going missing on Tuesday, her body was found in the woods this weekend. The car’s driver, 43-year-old Aleksey Popov, stands accused of her murder. Serou went missing on the eve of a summit between President Biden and President […]
MOSCOW—On Wednesday, a Moscow court designated dissident Aleksei Navalny’s political organization, the FKB, as “extremist”—effectively banning it in a historic ruling that stunned Kremlin critics across the country. The group is now banned from distributing information, from carrying out financial operations, from organizing rallies, and from taking part in elections. If employees continue to work with the group, they could face up to six years in jail. One day, when the Kremlin publishes transcripts of the secret court hearings, Russian law students will study the case of the state prosecuting a key opposition movement as radicals. Putin critics are convinced that […]
MOSCOW—Russia has morphed into a dystopia; not a day goes by without word that a new victim has been snatched by the authorities. The map of police raids on people’s homes stretches all across the country—any journalist, local activist, social media user or businessman could be next. It’s like living in the underworld and Russians curse the rulers as demons—or cherti—drinking the blood of the people. These nightmarish thoughts—previously only shared with friends in hushed tones—have been brought to life by Russia’s answer to Bansky. It’s far too dangerous to paint these images in the street, but Koin, an anonymous underground […]
MOSCOW—A new generation of elite Russian women with high-standing fathers—including ministers, members of parliament or top bureaucrats in the Kremlin—manage multimillion-dollar businesses, enjoy luxurious lifestyles, and pose in glitzy photos for high-fashion magazines and social media accounts with vast followings. Privileges, senior positions, low-rate bank credits and fat stakes in companies fall on the Kremlin’s daughters as manna from heaven. They are growing rich and successful, bringing welcomed women’s faces to top jobs—and raising thorny questions along the way. Women don’t often climb to the top of Russia’s male-dominated business or political pyramids. Twice as many men than women start their […]
MOSCOW—Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, has ordered arrests of key opponents for decades. But even after a brutal and bloody crackdown on opposition protests last year, his decision on Sunday to force an airliner to land so a prominent activist and reporter could be arrested appalled his domestic critics and European leaders alike. A Belarusian MIG-29 military jet forced a Ryanair passenger plane heading from Athens to Vilnius to land in Minsk airport, where police arrested one of the passengers, a skinny young man. A bomb alert was the official reason for diverting the plane, but nobody in Belarusian […]
MOSCOW—President Putin immediately ordered an overhaul of laws allowing civilians access to semi-automatic weapons after the latest tragic example of Russia’s outbreak of U.S.-style school shootings. At least nine people were killed after an attack using a semi-automatic shotgun in the city of Kazan on Monday. Children—who have become accustomed to deadly ‘Columbiner’ rampages across Russia over the last ten years—were so terrified that they leapt from classroom windows to escape the shooting. Horrifying video circulating on social media shows students plummeting from third floor windows. Local outlets reported that at least two students died from the fall. At least seven […]
MOSCOW—The day began with a dystopian wave of pre-emptive arrests. Many of his opponents were already under lock and key by the time President Vladimir Putin used an annual state of the nation address to remind people what happens to popular uprisings within striking distance of the Kremlin. With Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine in numbers not seen since the invasion of Crimea, Putin gloried in the fate of the pro-Western movement in Kyiv, seven years after he annexed a chunk of its territory. Similar forces were at play in Belarus, Putin said, where the CIA was accused […]
MOSCOW—Chechen leader and Putin buddy Ramzan Kadyrov has taken up multiple wives, including one woman, Fatima Khazuyeva, whom he first met when she was only 15, according to a report published Wednesday. Released by the independent outlet Project, the investigative report was focused on Russia tolerating “its own sultanate” within its borders, governed under separate rules. It featured a video and images of a villa that it says belongs to one of Kadyrov’s wives, Khazuyeva, who was a teenager when Kadyrov first met her at a Chechen beauty contest. Along with Khazuyeva, the Chechen leader is known to be married to […]
MOSCOW—Russia’s imprisoned opposition leader, Aleksey Navalny, is on a hunger strike in a notorious penal colony. He says he suffers from back pain while prison guards “torture” him by waking him every hour at night. Independent prison observers have been desperate to check up on him, with hundreds of Russian public figures sending open letters and petitions to authorities, calling for a halt to the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists addressed the Kremlin on Friday more bluntly: “He is being slowly killed.” The response? Instead of sending an independent human rights observer or a doctor to visit Navalny in prison, the […]
MOSCOW—The war in eastern Ukraine, which had cooled down over the past year, is reaching boiling point again. A 2020 ceasefire with Russian-backed militants has broken down. Soldiers on both sides are dying almost daily. Ukrainians are asking for an early, forceful move by President Biden, whom sources consider “Ukraine’s big friend.” Ukraine has become caught in a broader conflict between the U.S. and Russia, which escalated this week. Russia recalled its ambassador from Washington, after Biden called Putin “a killer.” The Ukraine war is the only hot conflict between Russia and the West in Europe, and the U.S. and the […]
MOSCOW—Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has announced that the military had attempted a coup on Thursday, the latest development in a country still recovering from last year’s lost war with Azerbaijan. Now, politicians and political analysts are speaking of Russia’s hand in the attempted coup, pointing to President Vladimir Putin’s strained relationship with Pashinyan. On Tuesday, Pushinyan had insulted Moscow by complaining about Russian missiles, an indirect criticism of the Kremlin’s strategy of waiting to intervene until Armenia was weakened in the conflict, despite its official status as a military ally. “They didn’t explode, or maybe 10 percent of them exploded,” […]
MOSCOW–Thousands of Russian internet users have been piling into the audio-based chat app Clubhouse, which, of all places, has become the go-to spot to vent about living in an authoritarian political system. This week has been chock-a-block with Clubhouse news. On Saturday, Elon Musk publicly invited Russian President Vladimir Putin for a chat on the app. Another avid Clubhouse user is Luiza Rozova, a 17-year-old alleged by independent Russian media to be Putin’s illegitimate daughter. She recently used the platform to share insights about her university major, her aspirations for a career in fashion, and her apparent affinity for wildly unhinged […]
MOSCOW — The Islamist insurgency in Chechnya was crushed long ago, but the harsh security services apparatus remained in place. Police routinely round up gay men, and reports of torture are well documented. In a new development, these police have now arrested ethnic Chechen gay men far from Chechnya. Security agents detained two brothers, 17-year-old Ismail Isayev and 20-year-old Salekh Magomadov, in a shelter in Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia earlier this month. The two brothers were active on social media, and posted LGBTQ and Pride symbols. Police brought both back to Chechnya by force, without any official allegations of a […]
MOSCOW—Vladimir Putin took a dark new turn towards authoritarianism on Wednesday when his regime began to imprison journalists who dared to report on the growing opposition protests. A Moscow court ordered the jailing of one of the country’s leading independent journalists, Sergey Smirnov, editor-in-chief of Mediazona. His supposed crime? Retweeting a joke on Twitter. The post included the date of an upcoming rally in support of Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner who was sentenced to almost three years in a penal colony on Tuesday for failing to meet his bail conditions while he was in a coma recovering from a Novichok […]
NIZHNY NOVGOROD—The Volga River was asleep under a thick blanket of snow, the endless forest on the far side also frosted in silver. On a recent weekend, figures of fishermen, each perched by their holes in the ice, looked like black birds from the top of the river’s right bank. If you travel to Nizhny Novgorod and need a place to meet a friend, don’t think twice: meet next to the George Tower, in the ancient castle originally founded here by prince Yuri II of Vladimir in the 13th century. This year the city celebrates its 800th anniversary. There are always […]
MOSCOW—The opulent, fortified Kremlin, which stands right in the center of Moscow, looked like a besieged castle on Sunday. Metal fences, traffic cops and interior ministry riot troops blocked all the streets around Lubyanka square, the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters, and Red Square. The metro stations were closed. It is not COVID-19 that brought on this unprecedented lockdown, it is a man Vladimir Putin refers to only as “a blogger.” Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader is in jail, but he has called on his followers to take to the streets. Last weekend, they did so in numbers not seen for […]
MOSCOW— As groups of youth dressed in hip winter clothes arrived in the Chistye Prudy area and began the walk along the pedestrian boulevard toward the central avenue of Tverskaya, it looked by 2 PM as if all pedestrians of the Russian capital were walking in the same direction—to Pushkin Square to join the protest against Alexei Navalny’s arrest. It turned out to be by far the biggest rally Moscow had seen since the summer of 2019. At least 30,000 people joined the anti-Putin protest in Russia’s capital, as dozens of thousands protested across the country, answering Navalny’s call. “What are […]
MOSCOW—Five months after surviving an assassination attempt, the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, arrived back in Russia on Sunday amid chaotic scenes as cops—some of who were dressed in riot gear—arrested supporters and tried to prevent people entering the airport where their returning hero was scheduled to land. A German medical rescue plane had evacuated Navalny from Russia in August while he lay in a coma. He flew back on budget Russian airline, Pobeda, five months later. The flight finally landed after circling Moscow for around an hour while the authorities refused to allow it to come into Vnukovo as expected. […]
Earlier this month in a small village in western Ukraine, a group of political pranksters met to declare self-government and to fly the country’s yellow-and-blue national flag upside down as their new symbol. The tiny group of misfits, led by a former plumber named Anatoly Balakhnin, was ignored by most Ukrainians; only Radio Liberty reported on the meeting, noting 10 people had shown up to it. Yet across the border, in Russian media, the new group was declared an “alternative state” and held up as an example of how Ukraine was supposedly facing “issues of separatism” in its western regions. It’s […]
MOSCOW—Vladimir Putin has surrounded himself with such a thick fog of secrecy that it’s now unclear where he is living, how many children or lovers he has, if his health is failing, or whether he’s planning to stay in power. The old KGB man’s love of secrecy has long boosted rumors and conspiracy theories that would race quietly around Moscow. But 2020 was the year the rumors span out of control. Encouraged by the omnipotence of the online rumor mill, the Russian media is now daring to commit them to publication. Tabloids this year dabbled in stories that the Russian president […]
MOSCOW—All of Yekaterina Mazalova’s friends tried to talk her out of joining a clinical trial for Sputnik V, the Russian coronavirus vaccine. “Don’t become a rabbit for experiments,” her best friend told her. Over the summer, Russia claimed to be the first country in the world to approve a vaccine, before trials had even begun. As assurance, President Vladimir Putin said his daughter took the shot. But the early missteps on the vaccine’s announcement and rollout only added to what is now a looming problem: 45 percent of Russians are skeptical of Sputnik V. The public fear over the vaccine falls […]
MOSCOW—In spite of freezing temperatures in the Russian capital on Wednesday, a crowd of Communist Party protesters grew outside Moscow city hall. Anti-coronavirus measures, one leaflet claimed, are “the revival of fascism.” Though its top leaders have mostly stayed clear of the issue, the rank-and-file in Russia’s Communist Party, the direct successor of the once giant Soviet party, have become the most visible coronavirus deniers and anti-vaxx agitators in Russia. Rising leaders in Russia’s largest opposition party have taken up the issue refusing to wear masks, downplaying social distancing, dismissing quarantine plans and even insisting they will not take Russia’s own […]
MOSCOW—The mother was desperate. In June, her daughter had died in what her daughter’s husband said was an accident, but the mother suspected it was domestic violence so extreme it led to murder. The husband worked in Russia’s security services and authorities didn’t seem to be investigating. Because she was a woman, said Vanessa Kogan, the American director of the human rights group Justice Initiative, investigators put “less value” on the daughter’s life. Like thousands of other desperate or disillusioned Russian citizens—political prisoners, victims of torture or abuse or indifferent treatment by the police—the mother turned to Justice Initiative for legal […]
MOSCOW—Several policemen serving in the drugs control department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs have been arrested for allegedly selling a bad batch of a psychotropic drug that has killed several of their clients. Victims of the cops’ alleged merchandise are believed to include at least two school children who were hospitalized. One of the kids reportedly died along with at least three other people. Siberia has been suffering from an addiction to synthetic drugs—collectively known as “bath salts”—for years but now the state’s drugs control agency appears to be getting in on the act. The drug seized in this instance […]
MOSCOW—Female leaders often face brutal treatment in post-Soviet states. It takes real courage to run for president against an autocrat, especially one supported by Vladimir Putin. All of this highlights the achievement of Maia Sandu, a Harvard grad and pro-Western democrat, who has beaten her competitor, Igor Dodon, the incumbent president of Moldova, in the first round of the country’s presidential election. Sandu not only won in spite of Putin’s open support and “good luck” wishes for her opponent. She has taken a surprise lead over Dodon in the first round and now, experts say, she has a high chance to […]
MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin is still sticking by his pal President Trump and refusing to recognize Joe Biden as America’s president-elect. The Kremlin announced Monday that they would continue to stand by their man while “there are ongoing legal processes” even though there’s little prospect that any of Trump’s complaints will be taken seriously by the U.S. courts. Putin’s reticence is not surprising: Biden once called Russia “the biggest threat to America” and the Kremlin hangs on to old words and meanings. Russian state TV made it clear throughout the election that Trump was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, and in Moscow, politicians […]
MOSCOW—Businessman Vladimir Marugov, also known as the Sausage King of Moscow—who famously called one of his factories the “Meat Empire”—was naked in a sauna hut on Sunday night when two masked assailants attacked him and his lover. The attackers demanded money, then tied Marugov and his partner up before murdering the businessman with a crossbow. His lover later managed to escape the crime scene and alerted authorities to the slaughter at the bloody banya. Before his grim demise, the multi-millionaire Marugov had dreams of building his family business into a traditional sausage empire, in the fashion of the most respected German […]
MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin vowed on Thursday he would not be swayed by Western pressure over the poisoning of his most prominent domestic critic, Alexei Navalny. Nonetheless, a reported mysterious shakeup in a Russian intelligence agency, and other comments by Putin, suggest the Kremlin has been forced to at least try to demonstrate distance between the president and those who might be behind Navalny’s poisoning with the military nerve agent Novichok. Speaking in front of Russian businessmen, Putin declared he had personally allowed Navalny to leave Siberia for Berlin for medical treatment, which saved the opposition leader’s life. A few hours later, […]
MOSCOW—For the third year in succession, a Russian teenager has done something that Europeans previously believed was the sole preserve of disaffected American students. Danila Monakhov, 18, embarked on a mass shooting in the city of Nizhny Novgorod on Monday, shooting seven people before turning the gun on himself. Handsome but socially awkward, the teen shooter had watched videos of the Columbine massacre linking him to a Russian social media trend of so-called “Columbiners,” who fetishize the U.S. high school shooting that took the lives of 12 Colorado students and a teacher in 1999. “Both his teachers and school mates knew […]
NIZHNY NOVGOROD—A funeral was held Tuesday for Irina Slavina, a celebrated local journalist, who set herself on fire outside the police headquarters in Nizhny Novgorod and died. But this is not a story about a reporter committing suicide. Hundreds of thousands read Slavina’s website, Koza.Press, the bravest media outlet in the city. Her readers knew exactly what she meant in her final Facebook post: “Blame the Russian Federation for my death,” it said. The authorities have been persecuting, investigating and interrogating this sensible and dignified woman for years. On October 1, local law enforcement broke down the door to her apartment […]
MOSCOW—The fighting in a mountain enclave in the Caucuses escalated Tuesday when Turkish-backed forces shelled five villages including the capital of Stepanakert, according to Armenian officials. Skirmishes broke out on the border of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the weekend and the official death toll is over 100 as a decades-old dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh or the Republic of Artsakh erupted into violence. Artsakh is an ethnic Armenian pocket that was once part of Azerbaijan’s territory but now hews closely to Armenia against the wishes of Turkey, which has lucrative oil and gas deals with Azerbaijan and a long-standing enmity with Armenia. […]
MOSCOW—Russia these days may look frightening to Americans, who hear often of election meddling and poisoning among other ill deeds. But consider for a moment the view from the other side of the divide, or at least the view presented to Russians by their television sets. The looming potential for World War III has become a regular topic on Russian state propaganda shows. Night after night, Vladimir Soloviev, who is often described as the Kremlin’s top propagandist, and his guests condemn the West’s “economically suffocating” strategy of imposing sanctions and suggest war is the logical outcome. The conclusion reached by Soloviev […]
Warning: This article contains distressing scenes. MOSCOW—A teenager in Russia has been forced to strip naked and make a horrific “apology” video after daring to criticize the regime on social media. The 19-year-old was a moderator for an anti-government Telegram channel that targeted the Russian republic of Chechnya, which is governed by Vladimir Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov and his militia are famous for brutal, inhuman persecutions, and for forcing Russian citizens to publicly apologize for any critical articles, blogs or even a comment on social media. Victims routinely get threatened, detained, tortured and finally give up, posting video apologies to put […]
MOSCOW—Men in civilian clothes with masks covering their faces grabbed the woman inspiring a revolution in Belarus on Monday. They pushed Maria Kolesnikova into a minivan at about 10am local time (3am ET)—the opposition leader hasn’t been seen since. Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ brutal leader for the past 26 years, has been cracking down on protests and threatening to arrest members of the opposition Coordination Council for an alleged “attempt to seize power,” but this is not simply a case of heavy-handed policing. It was a classic abduction, a technique of repression favored by the likes of the KGB and its Russian […]
MOSCOW—Yegor Zhukov is the face of a new generation of Putin opponents using social media as well as student rallies to stand up to the regime. On Sunday night, he was beaten up outside his home in Moscow hours after posting a YouTube video criticizing Putin. In a statement to the police, he said: “I have not suffered any property damage, but my face is broken.” An image of the 22-year-old’s bruised face, with bleeding lips and a swollen eye, has already gone viral online—an instant new symbol of Putin’s latest crackdown. The country’s leading opposition figure, Aleksey Navalny, was already […]
From the age of 5, he has rubbed shoulders with the most feted and feared world leaders, from the Obamas and two successive popes to Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. By 7 he had been gifted a handgun made of gold by Dmitry Medvedev, who was Russia’s president at the time. This week, Nikolay Lukashenko, the youngest son of the “last dictator in Europe,” came of age during the worst period of his father’s reign. With 100,000 protesters demanding Alexander Lukashenko’s resignation and free and fair elections in Minsk, the 15-year-old flew over the crowds in a helicopter, all dressed up […]
MOSCOW— Vladimir Putin has registered the world’s first state-approved vaccine against the coronavirus and probably expected congratulations—at least at home—for winning the global race for a vaccine, but even Russians aren’t so sure this is a good idea. Epidemiologists, pharmacologists, and doctors in Russia have responded to the alleged breakthrough with skepticism, and they certainly aren’t lining up to be injected first. Russian scientists plan to start the final stage of the trials on Monday, planning to begin the mass vaccination in October. Siberian scientists in the city of Novosibirsk are offering thousands of volunteers $1,997 for giving the vaccine a […]
MOSCOW—As Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Aleksey Navalny, lay in a coma on Friday after a suspected poisoning, a fierce tug-of-war raged between his family and authorities over whether he could be flown to Germany for additional medical treatment. Finally, on Friday night, Russian doctors relented and allowed Navalny to leave the country “on his wife’s responsibility.” All day, while a German air ambulance waited at the airport in the Siberian city of Omsk, Russian doctors at the hospital where Navalny was being treated and law enforcement agencies had refused to allow him out of Russia. Navalny’s wife appealed to President […]
MOSCOW—From Russia’s cyber-meddling in the U.S. presidential elections to its alleged hacking of coronavirus research, it’s clear the Kremlin is keen to undermine the democratic West. And it’s now looking to a new front to extend its hard and soft power and prop up fellow authoritarian regimes: the continent of Africa. Last week, the German newspaper Bild raised alarms about Russia’s growing influence in Africa, citing a classified German Foreign Ministry report that Russia has concluded agreements with six African nations to install military bases abroad, including in Egypt and Sudan. A private pro-Kremlin Russian newspaper, seeming to offer an unofficial […]
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Dozens of young people were singing lyrics by a local band on Palace Square: “We’ll be together, like Sid and Nancy, we’ll never live long enough to be pensioners.” The warm July night was young. In spite of the dark context of the song, people looked happy. The wind played with a young woman’s rainbow-dyed hair, while she was kissing her girlfriend. That scene was hardly unusual, even in Russia, where authorities ban what they call “gay propaganda,” same-sex marriage and even the rainbow itself. Liza, who is 21, said she felt much happier once she dyed her hair in […]
MOSCOW—The videos were certainly not what Russians have come to expect from their country’s secret warriors abroad; powerful men in unmarked uniforms imposing Russian influence on Syria, Ukraine and Africa. These men were caught on camera by Belarusian security officers totally unprepared. Some were naked except for underwear, with documents, propaganda leaflets and condoms strewn around their hotel rooms. Others wore vaguely marked uniforms, all 33 of them were military-age Russians hunkered down just outside Minsk a few days before Belarus’ presidential elections. Belarusian state news agencies reported the soldiers served as Russian security contractors with Wagner, a Russian private military […]
MOSCOW—When the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested journalist Ivan Safronov on charges of “state treason” this week, many of his friends were quick to remember what happened to his father. Both men covered news about national defense and Russia’s space program and were recognized as authorities in their field. The elder Safronov, who also was named Ivan, wrote for the newspaper Kommersant until one day in 2007 he plunged out of a window to his death. “We called our television show today ‘They Have Come to Get Us.’ We are outraged to see our friend and colleague Safronov being accused […]
MOSCOW—When Russia’s leading contemporary theater and film director Kirill Serebrennikov and his three colleagues went on trial, virtually all of Russia’s cultural elite, nearly 4,000 actors, poets, writers, and directors demanded authorities stop the shameful proceedings. Even the most careful celebrities stopped being careful and made public comments condemning the prosecution. “We tried to sit quietly but they continued to open our wounds with this case.” — Chulpan Khamatova, actress What they realized as they watched this case taking shape was that in Russia today any famous personality can be charged with some sort of cooked-up crime, arrested, and convicted. Dozens […]
MOSCOW—The crackdown on political opposition took a sinister twist during two months of coronavirus quarantines in the Russian capital. Marches and rallies were banned, so protests were reduced to what were called “solo pickets,” as in a picket line with only one person. “The contrast with the mass protests taking place around the world right now could not be more striking.” The protester would stand all alone, a surgical mask on his or her face and gloves on the hands that bore aloft a banner or placard in the last form of street expression allowed without a permit. And then police […]
Ukraine’s recently appointed prosecutor general, 41-year-old Iryna Venediktova, is a woman to watch. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, expects her to investigate and prosecute his predecessor. She seems more than enthusiastic about that, and it’s a process that’s been set up from the start to (once again) try to smear Donald Trump’s leading challenger for the presidency of the United States, Joe Biden. “The leaked recordings are a nothingburger, but Venediktova rushed to open the case.” — Poroshenko’ defense lawyer Ilya Novikov On the night of May 19, Venediktova personally approved the beginning of criminal proceedings against former President Petro […]
MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin is suddenly seen to be weaker than he has been in years, and economic pain from COVID-19 is one big reason, but not the only one. “Putin’s approval rating began to decline even before the coronavirus crisis, with oil prices collapsing and the economy deteriorating—and I don’t see what can stop this perfect storm this year,” says Denis Volkov, deputy director of the Levada Center, which does independent polling. “We see the public mood is changing the way we saw it during the crisis of 2008. (About 25 percent of our respondents say their salaries have been […]
MOSCOW—The babies are adorable, all pink and polished in white t-shirts with their names emblazoned on them, but more than 50 infants arrayed in row upon row of cribs in a Kyiv hotel are at the center of a huge scandal in Ukraine. They were born to surrogate mothers, and the parents who arranged for their births cannot get to them because of the global COVID-19 lockdown, according to a video originally posted in late April by a Kyiv-based company called BioTexCom. It has made a business—what looks almost like an industry—out of surrogacy. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian bloggers have mocked it as […]