The Naked Pravda

Russia is notorious for its political prisoners, and the authorities have only added to this population by adopting numerous laws since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that outlaw most forms of anti-war self-expression. Figures like journalist Ivan Safronov and opposition politician Alexey Navalny were already locked up before the full-scale invasion, and now they’re joined by politicians like Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. As relatively unknown activists are dragged into court for minor anti-war actions and the Kremlin takes hostages like American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Russia’s prison system is regularly in the news, but how is it actually built and what’s life like for those inside and their loved ones on the outside?

For answers, Meduza turns to Professor Judith Pallot , the research director of the Gulag Echoes project at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute (you can find the project’s blog here), and journalist Ksenia Mironova, the cohost of the Time No Longer (Времени больше не будет) podcast, where she interviews experts and the friends and relatives of political prisoners. Mironova is also the partner of Ivan Safronov, another journalist now serving a 22-year “treason” sentence in prison.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (1:48) A word from The Beet
• (6:31) How big is Russia’s prison population?
• (11:01) The prison system’s history of “reforms”
• (17:48) Is today’s system reverting to the Gulag?
• (20:00) Conditions behind bars
• (28:19) Comparing the Russian and Ukrainian prison systems and appreciating civil society’s oversight
• (34:05) Ksenia Mironova on the lives of political prisoners and their partners

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

It’s been more than 266 days since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In more recent few months, the war’s momentum has swung dramatically in Kyiv’s favor amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has Russian troops retreating from areas that Moscow has formally annexed.

To get a grasp on where things stand currently in the war, Meduza spoke to military analyst Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), who’s been meticulously gathering operational data about the conflict since before Russian troops started pouring over the Ukrainian border.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:38) What’s so special about HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems?
• (10:22) What other advanced weapons could give Ukraine new advantages in the war?
• (14:57) What’s the military impact of Russia’s airstrikes against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure?
• (18:57) How far might Ukraine’s counteroffensive reach into occupied territory? Will Russian defenses hold at some point?
• (25:19) Is the Russian military regrouping or on the verge of collapse?
• (27:41) What happened with the missile(s) that recently killed two civilians in Poland?
• (30:26) Is Russia going to run out of rockets or ammunition?

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

As you may have learned from the crowdfunding banners now adorning this website, the Russian authorities designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” on April 23. Our new status in Russia has chased away advertisers and deprived us of revenue, endangering Meduza’s continued existence.

That’s the sad truth of our situation right now, but what does it mean to be a “foreign agent” in Russia? How does it change life and daily business for individuals, NGOs, and media outlets? Russian lawmakers argue that these regulations are Moscow’s response to similar rules and restrictions in the United States, but does that comparison stand up to scrutiny?

To answer these questions and more, “The Naked Pravda” turned to Middlesex University London Associate Lecturer in Journalism Dr. Sasha Raspopina, Higher School of Economics Associate Professor Dr. Dmitry Dubrovsky, “Memorial” Human Rights Center lawyer Marina Agaltsova, and journalist Casey Michel, whose forthcoming book, “American Kleptocracy,” is due out this November.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at [email protected] with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Belarus has seen ongoing protests since August 2020, when election officials declared that Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) had won his sixth consecutive presidential term. The mass demonstrations were met with a violent police crackdown, and several members of the opposition were thrown in prison.

Pressure and threats from the authorities drove other opposition figures to flee the country, including Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanousakaya), who emerged as Lukashenko’s main political rival during the 2020 campaign season. Tikhanovskaya is now living in exile and leading the unified opposition from Lithuania, and her role both Belarusian and international politics has changed significantly in the last six months.

Back in Belarus, the authorities have been carrying out widespread repressions, targeting independent media and civil society organizations. At the same time, police brutality and the onset of winter has led opposition protesters to adopt new tactics for expressing their discontent. And although some analysts maintain that the opposition movement has stalled, others are predicting the return of large-scale demonstrations in the spring.

To find out more about how the opposition movement in Belarus has evolved and how Lukashenko’s regime has managed to withstand six months of protests, “The Naked Pravda” talked to Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, and Maryia Rohava, a doctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, whose research focuses on symbolic politics and identity in post-Soviet autocracies.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at [email protected] with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia and Twitter haven’t really gotten along for years now. In fact, since 2017, federal censors at Roskomnadzor (RKN) have filed more than 28,000 takedown requests with the social network, and the agency complains that Twitter still grants Russian users access to 3,168 of these materials containing supposedly illegal information. In retaliation against this insubordination, RKN started throttling local Twitter traffic on March 10, 2021, leveraging the country’s growing arsenal of deep-packet-inspection systems to reduce the bandwidth available to Twitter in Russia. The policy has failed to disrupt the service for many Russian users, however, adding to RKN’s list of unsuccessful censorship efforts against major foreign companies.

For a better grasp of what happened and what went wrong, Meduza turned to Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in digital media and society at Dublin City University’s School of Communications, and Mariëlle Wijermars, an assistant professor in cyber-security and politics at Maastricht University and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно