This past weekend, the notoriously unpopular incumbent Governor Alexander Beglov won reelection in St. Petersburg with a decisive 60 percent of the vote. In the lead-up to the election, Kremlin strategists planned to mobilize loyal voters and stifle opposition…

Russia has had significantly more women than men for decades. The country’s 2020 census found that women and girls made up about 54 percent of Russia’s population, while men made up about 46 percent. Since February 2022, this gender gap has almost certainly…

At the beginning of the school year, Russia officially introduced a new course called “Family Studies.” Designed for middle and high school students, the course aims to teach “spiritual and moral values” as part of a broader effort to tackle the country’s…

One year after Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, the Kremlin has “achieved complete control” over the mercenary group’s brand, according to a former U.S. diplomat in Burkina Faso. The paramilitary outfit, which has largely been retooled into…

Two months ago, the Russian authorities began throttling YouTube playback speeds to near-unusable levels. Initially, this had little effect on the platform’s popularity, but by early September, analysts reported a significant drop in views for many popular…

On September 5 and 6, 2004, the victims of the Beslan school siege were laid to rest. The terrorist attack was the deadliest in modern Russian history, killing 333 people, including 186 children, and injuring 783. While the authorities’ official investigation…

Vladimir Putin issued an order on Monday to expand the Russian army by 180,000 soldiers, setting the total number of the country’s active servicemen at 1.5 million.

Last week, Ukraine carried out its largest drone attack on Russia’s capital since the start of the full-scale war. More than 140 drones entered Russian territory in the early hours of September 10, according to the Russian authorities, and air defenses reportedly…

In 2023, a 16-year-old student commented on a post that called for people to attend a protest in support of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny. A few months later, officers showed up at his family’s apartment with a search warrant, and he was summoned…

Last week, The Guardian, citing sources in the British government, reported that the U.K. had decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike targets on Russian territory. A few days later, The New York Times wrote that the…

On September 16, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree ordering the Russian military to expand its troop numbers by 180,000 soldiers, bringing the total number of active servicemen to 1.5 million. The new policy, set to take force in December, will increase…

Sumy, a Ukrainian city just 18 miles from the Russian border, has been under regular Russian attack since the start of the full-scale invasion. When Ukraine’s military launched its cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk region in August, the strikes intensified…

Russia’s police force is facing a critical personnel shortage. The problem predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the war has greatly exacerbated it as cops have left the service for higher-paying jobs in the military. According to Interior Minister…

On September 16, the Kremlin published a decree from Vladimir Putin ordering the expansion of the Russian army to 1.5 million servicemen. That same day, Google Trends data showed a surge in searches by Russians curious about the decision’s implications, with…

At least two people were killed in a shooting in Moscow on Wednesday after a group reportedly led by businessman Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to break into the main headquarters of Wildberries, the online retailer that his wife founded. The incident comes just…

On September 10, Washington confirmed that Iran had transferred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. With more weapons suited for hitting closer targets, Moscow can now conserve its longer-range missiles for deeper strikes into Ukrainian territory. And…

Ukraine is likely to receive approval from its Western allies to use long-range weapons on targets deep in Russian territory in the near future. If this happens, the risk of missile strikes could become a new reality not just for residents of Russia’s border…

At the end of August, Dmitry Klevtsov, the deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg Housing Committee, announced that since 2019, the waiting list for subsidized housing had halved, dropping from 146,700 to 78,600 families. “The reduction in the number of families…

The phrase “apartment bombings” in Russia evokes a series of terrorist attacks that happened in September 1999. In two weeks, terrorists blew up four residential buildings in various Russian regions, killing 300 people. There were also at least two reportedly…

Russia’s Labor Ministry has drafted plans to establish professional standards for writers, outlining the job’s formal “functions,” which include duties like “developing the concept of an original literary work,” writing the main text, editing and revising…