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
Meduza reports on opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s death in prison and speaks to experts about his legacy and the political science behind autocrats eliminating dissident threats. This week’s guests are Meduza journalists Evgeny Feldman and Maxim Trudolyubov and scholars Graeme Robertson and Erica Frantz. Timestamps for this episode: (0:43) Photographer Evgeny Feldman reflects on what Navalny meant to him (4:02) The circumstances surrounding Navalny’s death (6:33) Maxim Trudolyubov discusses N...
Feb 16, 2024•24 min
After a year and a half of negotiations, Yandex founder Arkady Volozh and the company’s foreign shareholders have reached a deal to part ways with Yandex’s Russian assets. The Russian IT giant’s Netherlands-based parent company announced Monday, February 5, that it will sell a large portion of its operations to a consortium of Russian investors before rebranding and continuing to develop its remaining international properties. Yandex’s restructuring has been underway for more than a year. Meduza...
Feb 12, 2024•28 min
The Russian government has a message for its citizens living in exile: nowhere is safe for you. For years , it’s made this threat clear by subjecting its critics abroad to intimidation, forced repatriation, and assassination attempts. And just as the Kremlin has taken increasingly draconian measures to silence dissent at home since launching the full-scale war in Ukraine, it’s also devised new tactics for targeting activists, journalists, and politicians far beyond its borders. For insight into ...
Feb 05, 2024•41 min
Boris Nadezhdin’s surname has its root in the Russian word for “hope,” and he’s inspired just that in tens of thousands of voters as the politician with an antiwar message who’s come the furthest in the country’s byzantine bureaucracy for presidential candidacy. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it’s collected roughly 200,000 signatures, which is twice what it technically needs for the Central Election Commission to add his name to the ballot in March. While the commission’s approval remains unlikely, t...
Jan 29, 2024•30 min
The U.S. government is reportedly becoming more “assertive” about backing the confiscation of roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets to provide an alternative funding stream for Kyiv. The news comes amid faltering efforts in Europe and Washington to approve the budgetary allocations needed to sustain aid for Ukraine, which presumably makes it even more attractive to force Russia to foot the bill. Kyiv’s most ardent supporters in the West say the seizure of the immobilized Russia...
Jan 21, 2024•48 min
The Naked Pravda explores how Russia’s mobilization drive is pressuring society and capturing men for the invasion of Ukraine. This episode features Project “Get Lost” creator and director Grigory Sverdlin , whose human rights group helps Russians evade the draft and leave Russia (among other things). For a geopolitical perspective on Moscow’s mobilization, Meduza spoke to Dr. Stefan Wolff , a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham in England and the cofounder of Nav...
Jan 13, 2024•41 min
In a special holiday departure from The Naked Pravda’s usual coverage of Russian politics and news, Meduza in English’s social media editor Ned Garvey and senior news editor Sam Breazeale chat about their personal experiences living in Russia, what they found surprising there as Americans, and what still stands out today in their memories of the country. Timestamps for this episode: (8:52) Encounters with seedy characters and police (12:58) Travels around the country (15:01) Surprises in daily l...
Dec 29, 2023•32 min
Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never come easily for Lena Wolf . As the descendents of 18th-century German settlers living in Soviet Kazakhstan, she and her family “didn’t exist as a group” in the history books or on TV. As a result, many of their neighbors equated them with the soldiers from Nazi Germany who had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 — even though their ancestors had arrived in the Russian Empire more than a hundred years earlier. To complicate matters further, the ...
Dec 22, 2023•37 min
There’s a paradox in studying Russia today: the country has become “more prominent in the news agenda and simultaneously less transparent for observers,” thanks to the invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions, isolation, and the intensification of propaganda. This week’s show is devoted to studying Russia in conditions of growing non-transparency, which is the subject of a paper published in October 2023 by scholars Dmitry Kokorin, Dmitriy Gorskiy, Elizaveta Zubiuk, and Tetiana Kotelnikova. For mo...
Dec 15, 2023•31 min
On November 30, the Russian Supreme Court outlawed an organization that doesn’t exist: the so-called “international LGBT movement.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Ministry, which claimed the “international LGBT movement’s” activities showed signs of “extremism” and incited “social and religious discord.” The new ban won’t officially come into force until January 10, 2024, but its chilling effect was almost immediate. The day after the ruling, Russian police reporte...
Dec 08, 2023•49 min
On November 8, 2023, the E.U. recommended that Georgia be granted candidate status, which it applied for in March 2022, just after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The E.U. had previously only given Georgia what’s called a European Perspective, recognizing it as a potential candidate but stopping short of granting it candidate status, as it had for Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022. In recent years, the E.U. had criticized the ruling Georgian Dream party for its increasing restr...
Dec 02, 2023•48 min
This week’s show spotlights the experiences of two comedians, “Dan the Stranger” (Denis Chuzhoi) and Sasha Dolgopolov, who emigrated last year after their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine made it unsafe to continue their careers in Russia. Despite the challenges of creating and performing comedy in a foreign language, they continue to ply their craft in Europe. Dan and Sasha told Meduza about the incidents and brushes with the police that drove them to leave their homeland, particularly in ...
Nov 20, 2023•44 min
This week, Meduza spoke to Dr. Sergey Radchenko about his next book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power ( Cambridge University Press , forthcoming in 2024), which explores the era’s diplomatic history, focusing on how narratives of legitimacy offer crucial insights for interpreting Moscow’s motivations and foreign policy. The conversation covers telling anecdotes about prominent world leaders like Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev, their psychology,...
Nov 10, 2023•44 min
On the evening of October 29, a crowd of rioters stormed the Makhachkala airport and then flooded the tarmac after a flight landed from Tel Aviv. The angry men had assembled amid reports circulating on the social network Telegram about Israeli refugees allegedly coming to resettle in Dagestan, supposedly with a diabolical plan to oust the native population. Rioters waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Semitic slogans. A day before the airport violence, locals in the city of Khasavyurt assemb...
Nov 05, 2023•29 min
A new investigation from journalists at iStories and researchers at the Conflict Intelligence Team accuses the Russian military of using so-called “torture pits” against unruly, often drunk soldiers. Journalists and researchers think they found two sites, one outside Volgograd and the other outside Orenburg. iStories collected testimony from soldiers at two training grounds in these areas and identified satellite images that appear to show the pits those soldiers described. iStories spoke to a s...
Oct 28, 2023•19 min
