Anna Nemtsova

Russia’s top space official, Dmitry Rogozin, recited a well-known children’s poem in a YouTube video commemorating a national holiday last week. When he got to the line, “I love everybody around the world,” the clip took a dark turn, showing footage from the test launch of Russia’s nuke-capable Sarmat ballistic missile, nicknamed “Satan-2.” Threats of nuclear war are now so trivial to the Kremlin that they’ve become the stuff of jokes. On Saturday, Rogozin, the director of Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos, announced the second testing launch of Sarmat—a ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads—which he had called “a present […]

Scores of Russians with anti-war views have fled the country in the months since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, including journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens who made the split-second decision to leave after realizing their country has entered a dark new era. But now, after uprooting their lives in an effort to protect themselves and their families, some are returning to Moscow after struggling to make it abroad, despite the risk of facing criminal prosecution for their anti-war sentiments at home. Moscow journalist Alina Danilova and her family panicked after the Kremlin passed a law on March […]

Russian missiles are landing less than 100 miles from Moldova’s borders. Mysterious explosions rocked the headquarters of a security agency in the country’s Russian-backed separatist enclave last month. An economic crisis is looming. And a Russian general has threatened an expansion of the war in Ukraine to the Moldovan border. Unlike other western neighbors that are receiving Ukrainian refugees, Moldova is not a European Union member, and it does not have the resources the bloc has to house and absorb the rapid flow of asylum-seekers. Yet Moldova has received more Ukrainian refugees per capita than any EU state, in a piling-up […]

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—It was the terrible stench they remembered as they left Mariupol. Before Russian airstrikes it was a city of nearly half a million people. Today dead bodies are still rotting under the debris of bombed buildings while only a few hundred Ukrainian soldiers continue to hold on. It is possible to escape from a burning city but the smell—like the pain of loss—stays with you for a long time. Shells crashed around the Lyubomirsky family and their friends as they carried a stretcher and pushed a wheelchair chair 11 miles long from their still-burning home. The seven of them could […]

CHERNIHIV—During the long, dark and icy days of the winter, 7th grader Bogdan Parasyuk said he had been dreaming of springtime, when he could finally hop on his bike and race his friends along the central streets of his home city. Chernihiv is a charming, European city full of graceful historic architecture, universities, parks and hipster cafes. At least, it was a few weeks ago. Russia’s war on his country has turned the spring of Bogdan’s dreams into the worst time of his life. The 13-year-old boy’s war began when Russian soldiers began to attack Chernihiv on February 25. Air strikes […]

KYIV—Vladimir Putin’s onslaught has pushed Tatiana Bondarenko, a 53-year-old Ukrainian Orthodox Christian, to her breaking point. First, she was forced to flee her home town in Donetsk in the 2014 war. Then, in March, she had to leave Mariupol after her husband died in crossfire shelling and the city was all but wiped out by Putin’s army. Her life, she says, is ruined, and her heart broken. On Thursday, Bondarenko was weeping on the steps of Kyiv’s Pokrovsky Monastery, one of 12,000 Ukrainian Orthodox parishes still serving under the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) led by Russian Patriarch Kirill. She told The Daily […]

The image of a dead man with his hands tied up behind his back on the ground in the Ukrainian town of Bucha has become a horrific symbol of Russia’s war. He was photographed bloodied, wearing jeans, sneakers and a brown hooded jacket, his hands bound by white cloth. Days after that photo went viral, that same figure reappeared all over Moscow, where an unknown performance artist photographed himself laying on the ground, wearing similar clothes with his hands tied in front of the city’s most famous landmarks in a street art protest he called Moscow-Bucha. Like him, hundreds of Russian […]

As a mixed-race man living in Moscow, life for 30-year-old film producer and actor Jean-Michel Shcherbak was not always easy. But through all of the hardships he has faced in his life, there was one person he always thought he could lean on: his 63-year-old mother, Marina, a linguistic scientist and staunch Orthodox Christian. She raised him alone as a single mom, taught him to be smart, to work hard, and to avoid conflicts. She always reassured him that he would never have to worry about his future—because she would always be there for him. But his loving mother is also […]

MOSCOW—Olga Volkova, the director of orphanage #1 in Ukraine’s breakaway republic of Donetsk, is in the middle of one of the darkest, most difficult nights of her life. After Denis Pushilin, the pro-Russian leader of the separatist territory, declared a mass evacuation of women and children in the region at 4 p.m. local time on Friday, the director and her team were given just two hours to pack up the belongings of some 225 orphans and put them on ten buses headed to the Russian region of Rostov. Five hours later, an exhausted and emotional Volkova spoke with The Daily Beast […]

KYIV—Yelena Handei sometimes thinks it’s better not to watch her son’s biggest races live on TV. “My heart might stop during those 40 seconds,” she tells The Daily Beast. “It’s better for me to watch a replay.” It’s not the only thing she has to worry about. While Oleh Handei is in Beijing for the Olympics—to compete in the short track speed skating for Ukraine—his family back home is braced for an invasion by President Putin’s Russian army. The Handeis know the carnage that could be wrought if Russian forces surge over the border, as members of the family have already […]

KYIV—Yevheniy Murayev seems almost thankful that British intelligence outed him as Vladimir Putin’s suspected choice to head a puppet government in case of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with The Daily Beast, the wealthy 45-year-old politician, who now finds himself at the center of a global media firestorm surrounding the report, said he is “amused” by the “name recognition” he has acquired over the past few weeks. The same day British authorities accused him of being a Russian agent last month, Murayev posted a picture of himself holding a gun against a James Bond “Skyfall 007” backdrop. “The […]

KYIV—The Yangulbaev brothers could do nothing but watch in horror as thousands of people took to the streets of their hometown, shouting that the two men were “Western agents” and “The shame of the nation.” The pro-government mob stormed the public square of the Chechen capital city of Grozny and burned photographs of the siblings and their family who had earned the ire of notorious Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his most ardent supporters. It was a surreal moment for the exiled lawyers, 27-year-old Ibrahim and 29-year-old Abubakar, who had watched videos of the protests on Feb. 2 from a safe […]

CHERNIHIV, Ukraine—For years, Ukraine has been dealing with Russian aggression and preparing for an invasion on its Eastern flank where the two nations share more than 1,000 miles of sometimes disputed borders. But the recent bromance between President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart has opened up the terrifying possibility of a new line of attack. The southern border of Belarus is less than a three-hour drive from Kyiv, Ukraine’s economic and political capital. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has always had a testy relationship with Putin, until Moscow rescued him from an attempted popular revolution last year. By way of repayment, […]

MOSCOW—The sixth day of violent unrest devolved into a massacre on the streets of Kazakhstan’s capital city of Almaty, with dozens of protesters and at least 13 law enforcement officials killed, as well as hundreds more wounded. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev—who just a week ago was considered a weak shadow of Kazakhstan’s now-ousted Security Council Chairman Narsultan Nazarbayev—admitted he was the one who had given local security forces the order “to shoot to kill” protestors without warning on Thursday. Never before has any post-Soviet leader confessed to such a terrifying order. A day prior to Thursday’s bloodshed, Tokayev had claimed he was […]

MOSCOW—Every Chechen has come to fear the word “abduction.” Anyone who dares to speak out against Ramzan Kadyrov—the Putin-anointed leader of the Russian republic of Chechnya—dreads the heavy steps of armed men at their door. The latest spate of raids against critics and bloggers began last week. Men and women were snatched and disappeared without trace. In many instances, the only “crime” committed by those taken away and detained illegally was being related to human rights defenders or critics of the regime. Abubakar Yangulbaev, a lawyer with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, told The Daily Beast that he had […]

MOSCOW—After months of bubbling tensions and threats of all-out war, Ukraine has made the shock decision to grant one of President Vladimir Putin’s greatest wishes. As far as overtures go, this was a grand gesture indeed. Ukraine has charged former President Petro Poroshenko—who is described as “Washington’s puppet” in Moscow—with state treason and financing terrorism. The longtime enemy of Putin faces as much as 15 years in prison if convicted. Even more delicious for Moscow, Poroshenko was charged over the same scandal that has already ensnared Putin’s ally Victor Medvechuk, which involved funneling public money to the Russian-backed separatists in eastern […]

MOSCOW—It’s easy to see why President Vladimir Putin might have thought ratcheting up tensions on Ukraine’s border and blaming it all on NATO and the U.S. would rally his faltering support back home, but this time something different is happening. Most Russians aren’t buying it. Domestic propaganda levels have reached near-hysteria this year after anti-Putin protests swept the country following the attempted murder and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The drumbeat of war against Ukraine is becoming louder by the week and Putin has made ever wilder demands of NATO, which was the primary focus of his talking points in […]

MOSCOW—The religious Orthodox school that was targeted by a Russian teenage bomber had previously been described as a “hellish” and “damaging” place by students who had attended it and parents who had enrolled their children there. On Monday morning, 18-year-old Vladislav Struzhenkov, a graduate of the high school which is located in the small town of Serpukhov near Moscow, returned to his former campus to detonate a bomb, injuring himself and at least 12 students. The bomber’s age and name were first published on the Baza Channel Telegram account. The teenage bomber reportedly brought the explosive device to the school a […]

CHISINAU—Russian traffic police have to be ready for anything. On Saturday morning policemen in the Leningrad region approached a Mitsubishi crashed at a fence and left on the side of a highway, where they discovered a beheaded dead body with multiple stab wounds on the ground, and human blood and a shovel inside the vehicle. The corpse fell out of the vehicle’s trunk when it hit the fence, the news agency Tass reported. The police arrested three suspects later in the day and on Monday one of them, 23-year-old Yegor Komarov, stood before the court in the Leningrad region—and admitted that […]

KYIV, Ukraine—Lying in pain with pneumonia and constant muscle spasms, Andrey Mozyl could do nothing but hammer the hospital wall with his fist. He was hospitalized in the Ukrainian city of Odessa with COVID-19, but there’s only so much the medical staff can do to ease his suffering. “There is not enough oxygen. Doctors constantly complain about shortages of medicine,” the 54-year-old businessman told The Daily Beast. “Our president, Zelensky, says he is the ‘master of fighting COVID.’ But this is laughable.” About 800 people in Ukraine are dying of the virus daily. But the battle against COVID isn’t the only […]

KYIV—A Ukrainian film director of Armenian origin, 29-year-old Khachatur Vasilian, is facing a wave of vicious attacks from pro-Russia politicians and neo-Nazi thugs alike for his new film, My Young Prince, an artful movie about a gay teenager who falls in love with another man. When the film, which is set to debut in 2023, was announced earlier this year, Vasilian and his team were well aware that they might face backlash—especially from Ukraine’s far-right circles. What he didn’t expect was that his life would be threatened, not only for being the first Ukrainian director to film men making love, but […]

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. […]

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, […]