Reporting on war and its aftermath, political repression, migration, identity and the systems that shape everyday life.
Featured story
An exclusive account from a junior Russian officer who resigned after taking part in the invasion of Ukraine, tracing confusion, guilt and dissent inside the ranks.
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A profile of 19-year-old Olesya Krivtsova, prosecuted over anti-war social-media posts and placed on Russia’s official list of terrorists and extremists.
2022
Reporting from among families moved across the Russian border in the days before the full-scale invasion, uncertain what they were being evacuated from or towards.
2022
Voices from across Russia in the days after Putin’s mobilization order, as men weighed conscription, flight and the cost of refusing.
2022
A reported look at Russians who left their country after the invasion, and how war transformed their relationship with the only political system many had known.
2022
Six weeks before the invasion, a report from inside Russia on how ordinary people regarded the prospect of a war their government insisted was not coming.
2025
An examination of how Russia’s extremism rules have reshaped LGBTQ life and culture, and how people continue to navigate those restrictions.
2022
An obituary of the last Soviet leader, and of the reforms that ended one system without settling what would replace it.
2021
An examination of Russia’s long-term outflow of young and educated citizens, and the limitations of official migration data.
2021
Reporting from beyond Moscow on how demonstrations supporting Alexei Navalny exposed deeper economic and political discontent across Russia’s regions.
2021
A campaigner takes a fight against domestic violence into a parliamentary race, in a system with little room for either.
2021
One believer’s account of continuing to practise a faith the Russian state has designated extremist.
2021
How a small act of protest drew a disproportionate response from the Russian state, and reshaped a teenager’s daily life.
2021
A leading Navalny ally on what political work looks like under a sentence designed to make it impossible.
2021
A year after Belarus’s protest movement was crushed, activists weigh what opposition can still mean from outside the country.
2021
How the foreign-agent designation reached organisations whose work was never political, and what it costs the women who depend on them.
2021
Ten years on from the protest that made her famous, Alyokhina on what has changed in Russia and what has only hardened.
2021
An investigative reporter describes a police raid on his home, and what it signalled about the space left for independent journalism in Russia.
2021
Police clash with demonstrators in major cities and detain thousands, as protests over Navalny’s jailing spread nationwide.
2018
How the US–China trade war began redrawing the map of garment manufacturing, and what it meant for the labels inside designer handbags.
2018
A decade-old North Carolina denim company counts the cost of retaliatory tariffs, in a trade war fought over products few people associate with geopolitics.
2018
Inside McDonald’s Chicago flagship, where automation turned out to require more human staff rather than fewer — against the prevailing assumption about kiosks.