Author: Robert Coalson / RFE/RL

Six years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood before a joint gathering of Russia’s two chambers of parliament, along with dozens of cabinet and other government officials, and boasted that the country was developing a slew of powerful new weapons, a pointed warning to the West. On February 29, he did the same thing again....

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....

There were no mass protests in Russia in 2023. There were no hair-raising scenes of riot police in helmets and body armor beating students and shoving elderly demonstrators into police vans. Nonetheless, the harsh repression of dissent was the daily business of President Vladimir Putin’s security forces, with the action shifted to pretrial detention centers,...

When Henry Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923, Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin was still alive and the ghosts of World War I still haunted Europe. He grew up as Jewish child while Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, fleeing with his family to the United States in 1938. He was 29 when Soviet...

On October 7, commentator Marat Bulatov, who hosts the Day Z program on the social media channel of jingoistic pro-Kremlin television personality Vladimir Solovyov, opened his show by congratulating authoritarian President Vladimir Putin on the occasion of his 71st birthday. “We must, must support the president of our country or else what we see happening...

Officials in Moscow and in occupied Crimea have been quick to say that the July 17 explosion that damaged the only bridge linking Russia to the Black Sea peninsula was not serious and that rail and road traffic over the bridge would be quickly restored. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin asserted that the structure’s...

With Moscow deeply embroiled in a costly invasion of neighboring Ukraine that has no clear resolution in sight, Victory Day on May 9 will look starkly different in Russia this year. Across the country, parades and public gatherings to honor the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II have been...

In a television interview released on March 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow could deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of ally Belarus by July. He said all the necessary infrastructure for such a deployment would be in place by July 1. Ten Belarusian Air Force planes have been retrofitted to deliver the...

One of the few concrete proposals that Russian President Vladimir Putin made during his nearly two-hour address to the nation was that all participants in the “special military operation” – as the Russian government calls its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last February – should be granted two weeks’ home leave every six months. It was...

In a flurry of announcements, some of Ukraine’s major Western allies pledged to send advanced armored combat vehicles to help Kyiv in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Both the United States and Germany said they would provide new powerful weapons to Kyiv: 50 M2 Bradley fighting vehicles from Washington and 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles...

The speech was expected to be about Ukraine, where Russia’s military is struggling seven months into its invasion and where Moscow is claiming four partially occupied regions as its own in a land grab condemned by Kyiv and the West. However, the bulk of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nationally televised address from the Kremlin’s opulent...

“Now the average Russian must make an uncomfortable choice,” journalist and prominent YouTube personality Ivan Yakovina wrote on Facebook on September 18. “Who’s the hero and who’s the villain? And the answer is far from clear.” Mr. Yakovina’s comment came in the wake of a stunning statement by legendary Russian pop diva Alla Pugacheva denouncing...