North.Realities is a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
Longtime Russian prisoner-rights advocate Olga Romanova tells RFE/RL that Russia's prisons are inefficient, archaic, and cruel, but they suit the social and political needs of President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian system. Particularly during the invasion of Ukraine.
Prosecutors asked the Tver district court in Moscow during the retrial of noted protest artist Pavel Krisevich to sentence the defendant to five years in prison over a so-called "suicide" performance in which he fired blanks from a pistol in Moscow's Red Square.
The director of the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has been found dead in a suburb, local media reports said.
Since they learned of his death in May, Artyom Ponomaryov's widow and mother-in-law have been hunting for information of where his remains are kept and often joined forces with other families from their home village that are also trying to locate their loved ones' bodies.
Late on August 29, a series of explosions were heard at Pskov airport. It later emerged that four Il-76 military transport aircraft were damaged. Meanwhile, life in the neighborhood next to the airport seems to be carrying on largely unchanged after the drama of the night before.
In the western Russian town of Soltsy, home to an air base where at least one of Russia's Tu-22M bombers was destroyed by an apparent drone strike, our reporter found a heightened military presence, and unsurprised locals.
Police in the Russian city of St. Petersburg have detained and reportedly sent back a woman who had fled her native North Caucasus region of Chechnya because of fears for her safety, the SK SOS human rights group said, adding that Seda Suleimanova may face an "honor killing" upon her return.
Estonia is planning to increase electronic surveillance along the Narva River, which forms the northern part of its border with Russia.
Earlier this month, hundreds of people gathered as a Russian Orthodox priest blessed a massive monument to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the town of Velikiye Luki. Former police officer and historian Andrei Ivanov, whose own relatives were repressed under Stalin, was one of the few to object.
Russian investigators raided the homes of several activists from the election-monitoring organization Golos across Russia.
The former agriculture minister of Russia's northern Komi Republic, Denis Sharonov, has fled to the United States to avoid conscription to the war in Ukraine.
One morning this month, six people were found stabbed to death in a tiny settlement in northern Russia. One of the two arrested suspects is a former convict who had served with the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine. “I can’t make sense of it,” his sister told RFE/RL.
Prosecutors in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, asked a court on August 8 to convict and sentence anti-war activist Olga Smirnova to seven years in prison on charge of spreading fake news about the armed forces.
Russian anti-war activist and entrepreneur Dmitry Skurikhin has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for repeatedly "discrediting" the Russian military.
A former fighter from the Wagner mercenary group who was recruited from prison last year has been accused of stabbing six people to death after returning home to Russia following a tour of duty in the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.
Twelve arson attacks or attempted arson attacks on military conscription centers were registered across Russia in the last 24 hours, media reports said on August 1.
Olga Tsukanova, a leader of the Council of Mothers and Wives of Russian soldiers, said on July 28 that the group had stopped its activities after the Justice Ministry added the council and its leaders to the list of "foreign agents."
A court in the northwestern Russian city of Syktyvkar has sent political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky to pretrial detention for at least two months on a charge of making online calls for terrorism.
The turn of the 20th century brought a nearly unprecedented flourishing of Russian culture, the so-called Silver Age. But in recent decades, many of the wooden buildings outside St. Petersburg where this culture thrived have been lost to vandalism and neglect.
The loved ones of some prominent Russian prisoners tell RFE/RL about how their lives have been overturned by their confrontation with President Vladimir Putin’s repressive state -- and about what keeps their spirits up.
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