Eastern Europe

Overnight on April 9, Russian troops shelled the city of Zaporizhzhia. According to regional emergency services, the attack partially damaged a private home and started a fire....

Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine's Armed Forces, says that Russia is now sending regular troops to Bakhmut where Wagner Group mercenaries have been done the bulk of the fighting for Russia. Ukraine says deploying regular troops is necessar...

In early February, residents of Moscow's Kosino-Ukhtomsky District started protesting in opposition to the rumored construction of a new mosque in their area. Over the weeks that followed, the demonstrations grew into a bizarre and ugly spectacle on w...

Gleb Karakulov has the rank of captain in the Russian Federal Protective Service, also called the Federal Guard or "FSO." His identity has been verified by the investigative team of the Mikhail Khodorkovsky-founded Dossier Center, whose journalist...

Story by Svetlana Reiter (Meduza) and Irina Pankratova (The Bell), with contributions from Lilia Yapparova...

Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has reportedly gone missing in Yekaterinburg. Local publicist Yaroslav Shirshikov, who accompanied Gershkovich on a previous reporting trip he made there, told the outlet 66.ru t...

Metropolitan Pavel, the head of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, where the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been headquartered since 1992, said in a YouTube video posted Wednesday that "God will not forgive" Volodymyr Zelensky or his family for...

Police in Minsk have reportedly apprehended Alexey Moskalev, the single father from Russia's Tula region who fled house arrest on March 28, hours before a court sentenced him to two years in prison for repeatedly "discrediting4; Russia's mi...

A Tambov baking plant has expanded its product line to include reconnaissance drones. The improbable expansion was reported by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, citing the industrial bakery's deputy director Alexander Rudik....

Maria Drokova, the former press secretary of the Kremlin-sponsored youth organization Nashi who subsequently moved to the U.S., has received Kyrgyz citizenship, according to a presidential decree published online by the Kyrgyz authorities....

A Ukrainian Tu-141 Strizh drone packed with explosives exploded in the city of Kireyevsk, in the Tula region, reports TASS. RIA Novosti reports that the drone was carrying ammunition....

Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin says more than 5,000 former prisoners are now free since they received pardons after fulfilling contracts with Wagner Group....

A Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger aircraft en route from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow sent out an alarm 10 minutes after takeoff, reports TASS, citing aviation services....

A voice recording is circulating on Ukrainian traditional media and Telegram channels. It's allegedly a recorded telephone conversation between Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin (no relation to Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin) and billionai...

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has opened a criminal case, under the statute on "fakes" about the Russian Army, against Konstantin Sonin, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and a former professor at Mosco...

Russian president Vladimir Putin gave an interview to the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Corporation, which ran the interview on state-run television network Russia 24. During the interview, Putin Western countries' plans to supply...

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky says that Ukraine cannot begin a counteroffensive campaign due to a lack of weapons and ammunition, reports Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun....

The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) published a report on the treatment of war prisoners, which says that both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have participated in extrajudicial executions of military personnel....

The Kremlin will not take part in this year's Earth Hour, an annual environmental awareness campaign sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in which participants around the world turn off the lights for one hour, according to the Russian state new...

Former Moscow police department press service head Yury Titov, who left his position after officers fabricated a case against journalist Ivan Golunov in 2019, has been appointed as the Russian Interior Ministry's new deputy head of media relations....

A Barnaul court has sentenced Mikhail Zhilin, a Russian Federal Protective Service officer who fled to Kazakhstan after the start of Russia's fall mobilization campaign, to 6.5 years in prison on desertion and illegal border crossing charges....

On Thursday, the Save Ukraine charity facilitated the return of 17 Ukrainian children taken from the Kherson and Kharkiv regions and relocated to Russian and occupied territories....

Maria Pevchikh has been appointed the new chairwoman of the board of directors of the international Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), according to a series of posts on Alexey Navalny's social media accounts....

Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova complained in a Telegram post on Wednesday that the arrest warrants issued last week by the International Criminal Court fail to specify the crimes allegedly committed by her and President Puti...

While analyzing the massive data leak from the Russian censorship agency Roskomnadzor, the investigative journalism project iStories discovered that the state censor has been compiling internal reports on protest incidents across Russia....

Russia used Iranian-made Shahed drones to launch airstrikes on multiple Ukrainian territories early Wednesday morning, Ukraine's General Staff has reported....

Russia's Black Sea Fleet repelled an attack from multiple naval surface drones in the Sevastopol Bay Wednesday morning, according to Mikhail Razvozhayev, the annexed city's Russian-installed governor....

Late Monday night, shots and explosions were heard in Dzhankoy, a town in northern Crimea. Judging by the videos posted on social media, Dzhankoy may have come under a suicide-drone attack. The town mayor, Igor Ivin, confirms this is what must have happen...

Pavel Mushumansky, a 23-year-old native of St. Petersburg, was drafted in September 2022 but refused to bear arms. His Christian faith, he said, does not permit killing or taking part in combat. Hearing these arguments, two Russian courts ruled in his fav...

An informal meeting took place between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in the Kremlin, reports Interfax....

In the summer of 2020, a Russian film crew went to Russia's autonomous Chukotka region, the north-easternmost part of the Russian Federation, to film the daily lives of the region's inhabitants. Most of the resulting short film was shot in the vil...

In Grodno, Belarus, employees of the country's state security service (which uses the acronym KGB) shot and killed a foreign national. The person in question allegedly put up armed resistance to KGB officers, "using automatic weapons and detonatin...

Late at night on March 1819, Russian president Vladimir Putin paid an unplanned visit to Mariupol. The city was almost completely destroyed during a two-and-a-half-month siege by Russian troops in spring 2022, and was annexed by Russia in fall 2022. Russi...

The People's Friendship University of Russia has replaced its vice rector for student affairs, after an exhibition at the university featured a Ukrainian flag....

President of Russia Vladimir Putin has signed laws making it illegal to "discredit" or share "fakes" about volunteers and mercenaries fighting for Russia in Ukraine....

Data published by Russia's Central Bank show that, as of February 1, residents of the country have cash holdings equivalent to 105.4 billion USD....

President of Russia Vladimir Putin traveled to Sevastopol, in Crimea, for the ninth anniversary of the peninsula's annexation by Russia....

Original story by Anna Ryzhkova for Verstka. English-language version by Emily Laskin....

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin along with Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. Russia's president is accused of ordering the illegal deportations of children from...

The Minsk City Court handed down its verdict in the tax evasion case against former employees of Tut by Media LLC. The company was previously the largest independent publisher in Belarus, a status it had held since 2000....

Sberbank's supervisory board recommended that the bank pay a total of 565 billion rubles (7.3 billion USD), or 25 rubles (0.3 USD) per share, for 2022....

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin....

Yury Dmitriev, the 67-year-old former head of the Karelian branch of Memorial (an NGO devoted to restoring Russia's historical memory) is serving a 15-year sentence in a high-security penal colony. Radio Free Europe and Memorial have both drawn attent...

The St. Petersburg prosecutor's office has acknowledged that 19 antiwar paintings by Yelena Osipova, confiscated by the police from her solo exhibition, have been forwarded for "complex psycholinguistic evaluation."...

Russia's Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has decorated the military pilots who intercepted the U.S. MQ-9 reconnaissance drone over the Black Sea....

In 2024, barring any unforeseen circumstances, Vladimir Putin will run for his fifth term as Russia's president. According to Meduza's sources, Kremlin political strategists have started briefing officials from around the country on the rhetoric t...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping will visit Russia on March 2022, Russian state news agency Interfax reported on Friday....

Conscription officials in Russia's Mari El Republic have begun issuing summonses to draft-eligible men to report to their local enlistment offices, supposedly for the purpose of updating records, according to the regional government's website....

Last week, Alexey Navalny's longtime associate Leonid Volkov resigned from his chairman's post at ACF International (also known as the Anti-Corruption Foundation), amid a scandal around his surreptitious signing of two letters seeking sanctions re...

The American MQ-9 reaper drone, which was shot down over the Black Sea, has been found near Sevastopol, at a depth of 850900 meters (nearly 3,000 feet). Sevastopol publication ForPost reported the news, citing a source close to Russia's Defense Minist...