Robert Coalson worked as a correspondent for RFE/RL from 2002 to 2024.
Moscow says it isn't "carrying out any unusual military activity." Analysts monitoring the buildup of forces on Russia's border with Ukraine disagree, saying the concentration of forces is "definitely not an exercise."
Did they pass these laws in order not to use them?" one journalist asked rhetorically about the Russian government's latest bid to force media to take down stories connected to oppositionist Aleksei Navalny.
In 1922, Russia was marking the fifth anniversary of the 1917 coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power, but the country's future seemed very much up in the air. It was the crucial events of that year that marked a tumultuous break with the past and set the mold for decades of dictatorship.
The push to shutter the venerable human rights and historical research group Memorial caps a year in which President Vladimir Putin's government has aggressively persecuted political dissent, independent civil society and journalism, and public activism of all stripes.
Ukraine. European Security. COVID mandates. "Foreign agents." His political future. These are a few of the topics that Russian President Vladimir Putin may address at his annual press conference, amid rising tension over Moscow's military buildup near Ukraine and demands it has leveled at the West.
A Russian vocational college teacher tried to survive for a month on his take-home pay of just under $200. He gave up after two weeks, highlighting the fact that -- as prices rise -- base pay for teachers across the country remains far below the target set by President Vladimir Putin in 2012.
For more than a decade, Memorial has been devoted to gathering oral histories of the darkest times in Russia's history, when the state security organizations preyed with impunity on millions of Soviet citizens.
Parents in Perm have accused a primary-school teacher of physical and psychological abuse of students. But police declined to press charges after the school director -- the teacher's mother -- gave her a positive evaluation.
The authorities in Chechnya have included a biography of strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov's assassinated father, A Path Bathed In Light, as required reading in the North Caucasus region's schools. It's part of what critics call an elaborate personality cult that lionizes Kadyrov and his family.
The Russian parliament is mulling proposals for a national QR-code mandate to confront record levels of coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths. Some regions have already introduced such mandates, provoking sometimes violent reactions from businesses and the public.
Former Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko died in London 15 years ago of radiation poisoning. His widow has been working ever since to make sure his life and murder are not forgotten.
About three dozen defense lawyers in Belarus have lost their licenses in recent months, part of a pervasive clampdown by the state under Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Now, new rules take effect that critics say are intended "to restrict and undercut the independence of the legal profession across Belarus."
For three days last month, a Russian man dressed up as a medic to enter the "red zone" of a COVID hospital after he learned that his severely ill grandmother was not being treated properly. When he was discovered, he was kicked out and accused him of "discrediting the Health Ministry."
A 20-year-old Russian conscript died in early October at a base in the northern Murmansk region after nearly a month in a coma. Military officials say Yegor Voronkin committed suicide, but his family does not accept that explanation.
As Russia grapples with a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the exclave of Kaliningrad is facing a shortage of ambulance staff that has left people waiting days for emergency medical aid. Paramedics have been resigning in massive numbers because of unbearable workloads and declining pay.
The first administrative cases have been filed in Russia against individuals designated under the so-called "foreign agent" laws. People who have been targeted tell RFE/RL about the consequences of the designation, such as a treadmill of legal obligations and the constant threat of prosecution.
A bill expected to become law would require the leaders of all Russian regions to be called "regional head." In Tatarstan, the drive to strip the republic of its "president" is seen as a targeted assault on federalism as part of a concerted drive to bolster Putin's so-called "power vertical."
Former inmates in Siberian prisons and remand facilities that featured prominently in a recent leak of graphic torture videos told RFE/RL's Siberia.Realities how prisoners are "worked over" to secure false testimony.
Russian media rights lawyer Galina Arapova has become the first person to be designated twice under her country's controversial "foreign agent" laws.
Longtime Novaya gazeta Editor in Chief Dmitry Muratov has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at a time when independent media outlets and civil activists are under what they say is an unprecedented assault by President Vladimir Putin's government.
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