Author: RFE/RL’s Idel.Realities

Alsu Kurmasheva receives letters in jail – from family, friends, colleagues and strangers – but sometimes it takes weeks for them to reach her in pretrial detention in the Russian city of Kazan. On January 13, the RFE/RL journalist wrote, she received a large packet of letters after a long hiatus over the winter holidays....

“He never complained,” one woman from Russia’s mid-Volga region who asked not to be identified said about her loved one who was killed fighting in Ukraine on January 1. “He told us that everything was fine. Toward the end of December, they were moved to Makiyivka. And on January 1, tragedy struck.” Just after midnight,...