On June 25, NATO leaders agreed at their annual summit on a goal of spending five percent of their gross domestic product on defense, more than doubling the old two-percent target. It’s unclear how many members will actually reach this goal. Even the target relies on some creative accounting: of the five percent, only 3.5 percent is pledged to what officials call “pure” defense spending, with the remainder going to security and defense-related “critical infrastructure.” Ahead of the NATO summit,...
Jul 02, 2025•50 min
Historian Benjamin Nathans joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, August 2024). In the post-Stalin USSR, when the regime seemed eternal and there was little tradition of resistance to totalitarianism, citizens who came up against the arbitrary Soviet justice system had to invent their own strategies for effecting change. Nathans looks beyond the familiar stories of figures ...
Jun 23, 2025•54 min
Anthropologist Jeremy Morris joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his latest book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury, March 2025). The conversation explores Morris’s extensive fieldwork across urban, regional, and rural Russia to understand how society has responded to the collapse of the USSR, capitalist social Darwinism, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. He shares insights into his ethnographic methods, emphasizing the importance of embedded, long-term relations...
May 28, 2025•1 hr 16 min
The Naked Pravda interviews journalist and author Jill Dougherty about her new memoir, My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin , where she recounts her experiences studying and working in Russia. Dougherty talks about early influences, such as discovering the Russian language through an eccentric schoolteacher and later watching the Moon landing from a Leningrad dormitory. She shares insights from her decades-long career at CNN, covering key events from the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Bo...
Apr 29, 2025•47 min
Last month, as another 30 days of war passed in Ukraine, Russian activists, economists, and politicians in the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition spent much of their time arguing about a banking scandal from the last decade. The debate has been as mystifying to outsiders as it is confusing to those without an education in finance. With help from Ilya Shumanov , the general director of Transparency International-Russia in exile , The Naked Pravda breaks down the squabbling and criminal stakes at the ...
Nov 09, 2024•34 min
On October 20, Moldovans cast their ballots in both a presidential election and a constitutional referendum — and the results shocked many. In the referendum, which asked whether the country should change its constitution to include the goal of joining the European Union, the “yes” vote won by just over 50 percent. Meanwhile, in the presidential election, pro-E.U. incumbent Maia Sandu came in first but failed to win an outright majority. The day after the vote, Sandu accused “criminal groups” of...
Nov 02, 2024•37 min
Earlier this week, journalists at WIRED and The Washington Post reported that a “Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos” appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote false sexual misconduct allegations against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. At WIRED, David Gilbert wrote that researchers have linked a group they’re calling “Storm-1516” to the campaign against Walz. “Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, ...
Oct 26, 2024•42 min
In the past few days, both the Zelensky administration in Kyiv and South Korea’s national spy agency have said that they believe North Korea has decided to send more than ten thousand troops to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. On October 18, following an emergency security meeting called by South Korea’s president, the country’s National Intelligence Service released an assessment claiming that the North is sending four brigades of 12,000 soldiers, including special forces, to Ukraine,...
Oct 19, 2024•29 min
The Russian government’s new draft budget for 2025 through 2027 was introduced to the State Duma this week in its first reading. The state’s proposed spending exceeds earlier predictions, with 41.5 trillion rubles (more than $435 billion) allocated for next year alone — and that may not be the final amount. A record share of the budget is classified as “secret” or “top secret” — nearly a third of all proposed expenditures. To discuss the draft budget, focusing on allocations to the military, The...
Oct 05, 2024•28 min
Wildberries founder and CEO Tatyana Kim (who recently restored her maiden name) has been having a hell of a time shaking loose her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, but their very public divorce is just the tip of the iceberg in what’s become a battle between some of the most powerful political groups in Russia’s North Caucasus. On September 18: Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to storm the company’s office in the Romanov Dvor business center — just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin itself. Bakalchuk ha...
Sep 29, 2024•26 min
Last month, the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri Simes, a former think tank executive and an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In late August, The New York Times reported that these searches were part of the U.S. Justice Department’s “broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks.” In the past two weeks, U.S. officials have ta...
Sep 18, 2024•45 min
The Pentagon says it’s confirmed that Iran has given “a number of close-range ballistic missiles to Russia.” While Washington isn’t sure exactly how many rockets are being handed over to Moscow, the U.S. Defense Department assesses that Russia could begin putting them to use within a few weeks, “leading to the deaths of even more Ukrainian civilians.” “One has to assume that if Iran is providing Russia with these types of missiles, that it’s very likely it would not be a one-time good deal, that...
Sep 13, 2024•23 min
Russia’s federal censor has been throttling YouTube playback speeds for the last month or so, just like it slowed Twitter data transfer speeds back in 2021. Throughout August, Russian Internet users have reported sudden and widespread outages in access to popular apps and services like Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, and more. While the RuNet crackdown has become a familiar feature of the Putin regime, its technical side is hard to understand. For help with the science of R...
Aug 24, 2024•35 min
It’s been almost two weeks since the Ukrainian Armed Forces smashed through Russia’s border defenses in the Kursk region and began a surprise offensive that has advanced about 17 miles at its deepest point, according to Meduza’s estimates. Regional officials in Kursk have evacuated towns along the Ukrainian border, and more than 120,000 people have been forced to leave their homes. Vladimir Putin has met several times with top national security officials, but Russia’s president hasn’t yet bother...
Aug 17, 2024•37 min
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West has imposed over 16,000 sanctions on Russia, intending to cripple the economy driving the Kremlin’s war machine. But the much-anticipated collapse of Russia’s economy never came to pass. In fact, Russia’s wartime economy has proven to be surprisingly resilient, with the IMF estimating that Russia’s GDP grew by 3.5% in 2023 and will continue to grow by 3.2% in 2024. The Kremlin has managed to keep Russia’s economy afloat, in large pa...
Jun 15, 2024•40 min
It’s a tense moment for Ukraine. The optimism that followed Ukraine’s early successes on the battlefield in 2022 started to fade last summer as its counteroffensive failed to achieve a breakthrough. By late 2023, Ukraine’s then-commander-in-chief said the war had reached a “stalemate” — and by the start of the spring, things were looking even worse, with high-ranking Ukrainian officers warning a collapse of the front lines could be imminent without more weapons from Washington. In mid-April, U.S...
Jun 08, 2024•31 min
For the past two months, millions of Kazakhstanis have been glued to their screens, witnessing a landmark moment in the nation’s history: a murder trial live-streamed on YouTube. This was the trial of Kuandyk Bishimbayev, Kazakhstan’s former economic minister, who was convicted of torturing and killing his wife, Saltanat Nukenova, on November 9, 2023. The brutal CCTV footage of the incident went viral, not just within Kazakhstan but internationally as well. This trial not only highlighted Saltan...
May 31, 2024•46 min
Historically, Ukraine has been home to people of a variety of faiths and religious denominations, and it’s been exceptionally “open to receiving a wide spectrum of religious communities” in the years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R, according to expert Catherine Wanner. This laissez-faire approach to religion stands in stark contrast to Russian state policy, which claims to embrace religious pluralism while systematically repressing religious liberty. In Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, expe...
May 25, 2024•38 min
It’s strange days recently at Russia’s Defense Ministry. Amid the replacement of the agency’s head, police have brought large-scale bribery charges against at least two senior officials in the Defense Ministry, raising questions about the state of corruption in Russia’s military and the Kremlin’s approach to the phenomenon in wartime. Also earlier this month, the American Political Science Review published relevant new research by political scientist David Szakonyi , an assistant professor at Ge...
May 18, 2024•29 min
The leadup to voting this November will renew fears in the United States about Russian malign influence. That means more paranoia from politicians, more alarming op-eds and white papers from the institutes created and funded to draw attention to foreign disinformation, and more mutual suspicions among ordinary people on social media, where journalists and pundits often draw their anecdotal conclusions about popular opinion. This week, for a skeptical view of the foreign disinformation threat in ...
May 10, 2024•31 min
Over the past few weeks, many in the think-tank community have argued about the negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv in the first two months of the full-scale invasion, following an article published on April 16 in Foreign Affairs, titled “ The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine: A Hidden History of Diplomacy That Came Up Short — but Holds Lessons for Future Negotiations ,” by Samuel Charap , a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Sergey Radchenko , a professor at ...
May 03, 2024•33 min
According to a new investigation from Novaya Gazeta Europe, Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov was diagnosed with pancreatic necrosis in 2019 and isn’t long for this world. Since then, he’s supposedly undergone “regular procedures,” including surgeries, at an elite hospital in Moscow. A bout of COVID-19 in 2020 reportedly further degraded his health, kicking off another round of sudden weight loss. His kidneys reportedly started to fail and fluid built up in his lungs, making it difficult for him ...
Apr 27, 2024•26 min
It’s no secret that the economies of Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan rely heavily on labor migration to stay afloat. In 2022, according to the International Organization for Migration, remittances from Russia accounted for just over half of Tajikistan’s GDP, and made up more than 20 percent of the GDPs of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Many of the workers sending these remittances are their families’ sole breadwinner — and given the lack of employment opportunitie...
Apr 19, 2024•47 min
Look at almost any recent major news story from Russia, and you’ll find the Federal Security Service, better known as the FSB. Having failed to prevent the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in Moscow last month, the agency has played a major role in arresting and apparently torturing the suspected perpetrators. It was FSB agents who arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges just over a year ago. And the FSB has been heavily involved in enforcing Russia’s crackdo...
Apr 12, 2024•44 min
It’s been seven weeks since a local branch of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service published a brief news post about the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “He went for a walk, felt sick, collapsed unconscious, and couldn’t be resuscitated.” Russian officials would later insist that Navalny died of natural causes — his mother was told that he succumbed to “sudden death syndrome.” In mid-March, while celebrating his claim on a fifth presidential term, Vladimir Putin finally uttered Naval...
Apr 06, 2024•49 min
It’s been a little more than a week since a group of armed men walked into a concert hall just outside Moscow and gunned down dozens of defenseless people. A branch of the Islamic State active in South-Central Asia known as Islamic State – Khorasan, or IS-K, claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack in a statement through an affiliated media channel. That same channel later published body-cam footage recorded by the terrorists in the concert hall during the attack. Western intelligence offici...
Mar 31, 2024•48 min
For decades, NATO’s European members have depended on the U.S. to bolster their defense. Perhaps nowhere is this reliance more acutely felt than in the Baltic countries, which joined the alliance 20 years ago this month, and experienced occupation in living memory. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine entering its third year and the future of U.S. military support for Kyiv in doubt, European officials and military analysts have begun sounding the alarm about the risk of Moscow starting a...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 12 min
U.S. President Joe Biden took less than two minutes to bring up Russia in his 2024 State of the Union address. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” Biden said, prompting a standing ovation. “But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.” An unwavering commitment to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia has been at the center of the Biden administration’s foreign policy for more th...
Mar 08, 2024•31 min
Last month, there was a sudden panic in the United States when House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner issued a statement warning of a “serious national security threat” and demanded that President Biden declassify related information. The American media subsequently reported that Turner was referring to alleged Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space, though U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby later clarified that the matter concerns anti-satellite weapons that canno...
Mar 01, 2024•36 min
To mark the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s ongoing campaign to seize more territory, Meduza sat down with the author of The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine , Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for The Financial Times and a foremost journalist covering the country who was there on the ground when the first Russian missiles struck and troops stormed over the border. In the book, Miller recounts how his life became intertwined with Ukraine and t...
Feb 23, 2024•38 min
