On Thursday morning, March 2, a few dozen armed men crossed over from Ukraine and raided two small towns in the Russian border region of Bryansk. The militants — described as “Ukrainian saboteurs” in hurried Russian news reports and later identified as soldiers in the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps — posed for some pictures, recorded a few breathless videos, and retreated back into Ukraine in short order. Conflicting reports followed about clashes with the incursion group: the Russian authori...
Mar 03, 2023•38 min
Amid an escalating public conflict between Russia’s Defense Ministry and Evgeny Prigozhin, The Naked Pravda builds on last year’s episode about the warlord-tycoon, looking more closely at the paramilitary cartel he fronts. To understand how Wagner Group should be defined, why its brutality is so valuable to Moscow, and how its recruitment of prisoners has played out, Meduza spoke to three experts. Timestamps for this episode: (3:55) Candace Rondeaux (a professor of practice and fellow at the Mel...
Feb 23, 2023•43 min
In early February 2022, as Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán traveled to Moscow on what he described as a “peace mission.” Standing alongside Vladimir Putin at a press conference, Orbán urged other Western countries to adopt a “Hungarian model” of relations with Russia — one supposedly based on “mutual respect.” Just a few weeks later, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Hungary’s neighbor, Ukraine. For Orbán and hi...
Feb 17, 2023•38 min
In the initial months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people left Russia. Some were fleeing the war’s economic repercussions or the country’s accelerated descent into authoritarianism, while others saw emigration as a moral necessity. Then, in September, Putin’s mobilization announcement set off a new wave of panic, causing another 700,000 or so to leave Russia in a span of just two weeks (though some have since returned). A huge number of these...
Feb 10, 2023•59 min
On May 11, 2022, The Washington Post announced that it was establishing a new bureau in Kyiv with Isabelle Khurshudyan leading coverage as Ukraine bureau chief. Elements of The Post’s expansive coverage dedicated to the war in Ukraine include a 24-hour live updates page on The Post’s site, a Telegram channel for news updates (now with more than 40,000 subscribers), and a database of verified, on-the-ground footage. Ms. Khurshudyan joined The Naked Pravda to talk about The Post’s Kyiv bureau and ...
Feb 03, 2023•28 min
Writer Anna Arutunyan, author of “ The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult ” (2014), has a new book out about the early pivotal years of Russia’s invasion of the Donbas, titled “ Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine .” A longtime journalist, former International Crisis Group senior analyst, and now a Wilson Center global fellow, Arutunyan draws on interviews, reporting from the warzone, and other research to reconstruct the relationships between civilian...
Jan 27, 2023•35 min
On this week’s episode of The Naked Pravda, Meduza speaks to anthropologist Jeremy Morris about foreign Russia scholars’ growing reliance on state television as a means of monitoring what is thought to be public opinion. Dr. Morris, a professor of Russian and Global Studies in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark, argues that researchers should devote more attention to less controlled platforms on social media and exercise more caution when generalizing based on surv...
Jan 20, 2023•43 min
In an article titled “ Ukrainian Voices? ” recently published in New Left Review, sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko warns that talk in the West about Ukraine’s “decolonization” often focuses too much on “symbols and identity” and not enough on “social transformation.” Representing the war in Ukraine “as an ideological conflict of democracy against autocracy” is intellectually inconsistent, he writes, and “works poorly” with audiences across the Global South. Dr. Ishchenko criticizes the identarian...
Dec 30, 2022•37 min
Given current events in Russia and Ukraine, much of today’s expertise about Russia is again created remotely. It simply isn’t safe for many journalists and researchers to be in the country today due mainly to the militarized censorship of speech related to the invasion of Ukraine. So, what happens when Russia experts are forced to work outside of Russia? When access to audiences, writers, and source material narrows so suddenly, how does our grasp of Russia change? To explore these issues, The N...
Dec 22, 2022•34 min
In a guest essay this week for Meduza, philologist Gasan Gusejnov reflected on the experiences of past “waves” of Russian emigrants and on today’s interactions between the Russian-speaking diaspora and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, explaining how the Putin regime has abused the Russian language by elevating “hateful violence.” Gusejnov also described the “taste for language resistance” developing among younger Russian-speakers as efforts abroad to challenge the Kremlin’s grip on speech accelerate...
Dec 03, 2022•31 min
A couple of months ago, videos from Russian prisons started appearing online showing a beefy-looking, bald man addressing large crowds of inmates, trying to recruit them as mercenaries to go fight (and quite possibly die, he admitted) in Ukraine. “Do you have anybody who can pull you out of the slammer when you’ve still got 10 years on your sentence? There are two who can get you out: Allah and God, and it will be in a wooden box. I’ll take you alive, though I won’t always return you that way.” ...
Nov 23, 2022•59 min
It’s been more than 266 days since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In more recent few months, the war’s momentum has swung dramatically in Kyiv’s favor amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has Russian troops retreating from areas that Moscow has formally annexed. To get a grasp on where things stand currently in the war, Meduza spoke to military analyst Rob Lee , a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), who’s been meticulously gath...
Nov 18, 2022•33 min
It’s an exaggeration to say that Russian aviation has been cut off from the outside world, but the loss of routes to popular Western destinations has squeezed airlines profits while sanctions complicate basic maintenance. In late July, for example, several Russian airlines reportedly advised pilots, not to use their brakes so much when landing, in order to extend the equipment’s lifespan. To keep its fleets in the air, Russia must now rely chiefly on repairing planes using spare parts from other...
Nov 11, 2022•34 min
On October 23, following a report in Russia’s state news, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu started calling his counterparts in France, Turkey, the UK, and the United States, warning that Moscow has collected intelligence suggesting that the Ukrainian government is preparing a “provocation” involving the use of a dirty bomb. A day later, Russia’s Foreign Ministry claimed that Kyiv plans to “camouflage” an explosion of “the radioactive substances derived from the spent nuclear fuel storages ...
Nov 04, 2022•44 min
Now that Vladimir Putin is 70 years old, we’re understandably getting less of his torso in official photographs, but the Kremlin nevertheless relies on tropes of masculinity to validate the regime and its actions abroad, particularly in Ukraine and when it comes to confrontation with the West. This gendered rhetoric resonates with Russians just as it does in societies and nations all over the world. The authorities and the public work together to manufacture consensus about who gets to be on top...
Oct 21, 2022•32 min
On Tuesday, November 8, the U.S. is holding midterm elections — all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested, in addition to gubernatorial races in 39 states and territories. In all this politicking, mainstream support for Ukraine remains strong, but it was only a few years ago when Donald Trump declared at his inauguration: “We assembled here today our issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every ...
Oct 15, 2022•37 min
The Chinese government has consistently threatened to take Taiwan by force if the government there declares formal independence. American politician Nancy Pelosi completed a two-day trip to Taiwan in early August, enraging Beijing, raising regional tensions, and thrilling Russian state propagandists, who are clearly desperate to draw the two most powerful countries on Earth into a shooting war that would presumably weaken Western resolve to counter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Two months after ...
Oct 08, 2022•31 min
When announcing a draft to reinforce Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin accused the West of “nuclear blackmail,” claiming that “high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries” have endorsed the “possibility and admissibility” of using nuclear weapons against Russia. In the same remarks, Putin vowed to use “all available weapon systems” to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity” — a precarious position now that Moscow has annexed four more Ukrainian regions without even cont...
Oct 01, 2022•44 min
As acting president, elected president, prime minister, and then president again, Vladimir Putin has now ruled Russia for almost 23 years. And it doesn’t look like he plans to retire any time soon. Following amendments to the Russian constitution in 2020, Putin is now able to run in two more presidential elections. This means he could potentially remain in power until 2036, at which point he’ll be turning 83. Putin is indeed getting old, and ever since he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine...
Sep 23, 2022•42 min
Meduza’s only English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda, returns for a third season tomorrow on Friday, September 23. Throughout the new season, each show explores a hypothetical event and its potential consequences for Russia and its relationship with the rest of the world. On upcoming episodes, Meduza asks journalists, scholars, and other experts about the context and possibilities behind the questions that keep people up at night: What if Putin dies tomorrow? What happens to the Ukraine war ...
Sep 22, 2022•2 min
Meduza welcomes European Council on Foreign Relations Senior Policy Fellow Kadri Liik for a discussion about her recent article, “ Putin’s Archaic War: Russia’s Newly Outlawed Professional Class – And How It Could One Day Return ,” where she argues that the invasion of Ukraine is “effectively de-modernizing Russia” and derailing processes that could have put the country on a less aggressive, more professional path. A specialist in Russian domestic and foreign policy and in relations between Russ...
Jul 09, 2022•28 min
After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, five Hollywood giants — Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Sony Pictures, and Paramount — all stopped releasing new films in Russia. Netflix, which was producing multiple shows in Russia for the domestic market, has also suspended all service there. Amazon Prime has halted streaming in Russia, too. All this comes just as the entertainment industry was hoping to rebound from two years of pandemic shutdowns and concerns. Russian...
Jun 25, 2022•34 min
Earlier this week, the European Union passed a landmark agreement banning most Russian oil imports into the region by the end of the year, though the embargo features a temporary exemption for imports delivered by pipeline in order to overcome opposition from landlocked Hungary. In late May, the U.S. Treasury declined to extend a license that allowed Russia to make payment on its sovereign debt to U.S. holders, possibly accelerating the prospect of Russia defaulting on its government debt. To di...
Jun 03, 2022•27 min
Through speeches by political leaders and in television broadcasts that have blanketed the country (as well as new territories recently seized by force), the Kremlin has argued breathlessly that Ukrainian statehood is a historical accident weaponized by Russia’s enemies. This rhetoric, which essentially denies the existence of an independent Ukranian identity, has reached not only millions of civilians but also the Russian troops now in Ukraine, where journalists, the local authorities, and inte...
May 22, 2022•1 hr 41 min
The past nine weeks of all-out war have completely upended civilian life throughout Ukraine. After withdrawing from around Kyiv and Chernihiv in late March, Russian forces are ostensibly refocusing their invasion on taking Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions. With many cities, towns, and villages already in dire humanitarian situations, civilians living in these areas are faced with the difficult choice of attempting to evacuate or bracing themselves for an escalated offensive. Meanwhile, res...
Apr 30, 2022•40 min
The Russian North Caucasus has played a special role in the invasion of Ukraine. Journalists estimate that at least 60 men from Dagestan died fighting for Russia by March 23, indicating that this republic had lost more soldiers, by far, than any other region in Russia. In terms of public messaging, Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the “special operation,” rattling his saber at every opportunity and declaring the seizure of Ukrainian territories before it’...
Apr 18, 2022•18 min
Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities imposed military censorship in all but name, annihilating the entire domestic free press. Within a week of Moscow’s “special operation in the Donbas,” the television station Dozhd and radio station Ekho Moskvy both shut down, ending 12 and 32 years, respectively, of independent journalism. In late March, after a 28-year run, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta suspended all reporting until the end of the war, citing warnings from the ...
Apr 09, 2022•42 min
This week’s guest is Meduza special correspondent Lilya Yapparova , who just spent several days in Chernihiv, reporting on how the Russian invasion has destroyed local families and upended residents’ lives. She managed to leave the city just before Russian troops besieged it again. Now back in Kyiv, still reporting on the war, Lilya joined the podcast to talk about her latest article, “ ‘Mom, please make it stop’: Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova was in Chernihiv in the final days be...
Apr 02, 2022•32 min
We’re now more than three weeks deep into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and many are asking the question: What information is still reaching Russians? Unless you’re using a VPN to tunnel beneath the state’s censorship, Instagram is blocked, Facebook is blocked, Twitter is blocked, and YouTube is probably next. The independent news media is in tatters, and it looks like the main social networks left standing will be domestic services like Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte, which enforce the ...
Mar 20, 2022•38 min
In the days since Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Western world has imposed crippling economic sanctions on Russia designed to force extreme costs on the Kremlin for its aggression. In the Biden administration’s words, the measures will “weaken the Russian defense sector and its military power for years to come and target Russia’s most important sources of wealth.” Russian economy expert and Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow Maximilian Hess says he worries tha...
Mar 07, 2022•28 min
