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Meduza’s English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda highlights how our top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. The broader context of Meduza’s in-depth, original journalism isn’t always clear, which is where this show comes in. Here you’ll hear from the world’s community of Russia experts, activists, and reporters about issues that are at the heart of Meduza’s stories and crucial to major events in and around Russia.
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The Naked Pravda
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What’s behind Putin’s recent spate of anti-Semitic statements?
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Vladimir Putin has made a slew of anti-Semitic comments in the last few months, from saying Ukraine’s President Zelensky is “not Jewish but a disgrace to the Jewish people” to responding to reports of a former advisor moving to Israel by calling him “some sort of Moisha Israelievich.” In one interview with a Russian propagandist, Putin said that Ze…
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On June 23, 2023, hours before Yevgeny Prigozhin would shock the world by staging a mutiny against the Russian military, Meduza co-founder and CEO Galina Timchenko learned that her iPhone had been infected months earlier with “Pegasus.” The spyware’s Israeli designers market the product as a crimefighting super-tool against “terrorists, criminals, …
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The Naked Pravda
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Russian elections after an eternity under Putin
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This week’s show tackles Russia’s 2023 regional elections, scheduled for Sunday, September 10, though several regions will keep polling stations open all weekend. “Up for grabs” in contests with mostly predetermined outcomes are 26 gubernatorial offices and seats in 20 regional parliaments. There’s also a whole mess of municipal and local races. Oc…
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How complicit are ordinary Russians in the invasion of Ukraine? That’s a question at the core of Russia’s War, a book published this May, where author Jade McGlynn explores what she calls “the grievances, lies, and half-truths that pervade the Russian worldview,” arguing that too many people in Russia have “invested too deeply in the Kremlin’s alte…
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A new Russian history textbook for 11th graders announced earlier this summer, “The History of Russia, 1945 to the Start of the 21st Century,” has almost 30 pages devoted directly to explaining and especially to justifying the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The whole textbook is 448 pages: There are 264 pages covering the post-war Soviet period, 48 p…
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‘Goodbye, Eastern Europe’ with Jacob Mikanowski
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“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there.” These are the opening lines of Goodbye, Eastern Europe, a new book by writer and historian Jacob Mikanowski that offers a sweeping history of a region that he argues is disappearing. Not in the literal sense, of course; the …
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Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny famously returned to Moscow in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested at the airport for supposed parole violations. A month later, his suspended sentence was replaced with a 2.5-year prison sentence. Roughly a year later, in March 2022, a judge added another nine years to his prison term, convicti…
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Loyalty and competence in Russia's armed forces
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In the final week before the State Duma’s summer recess, Russian lawmakers have been ramming through some curious legislation, including several initiatives the authorities would apparently like to roll out now before Putin’s re-election campaign presumably kicks off in the fall. Notably, one last-minute amendment empowers the president to charge g…
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Since the early aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many major Western companies have been in various stages of divesting from Russia. Nearly a year and a half into the war, we’ve entered a new phase of business relations, as the Kremlin has started nationalizing foreign companies’ Russian assets. The latest watershed moment occurred o…
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Counting Russia’s 47,000 killed combatants
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How many Russians have been killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? If you visited Meduza’s website this week, you’ll know that we ran the numbers and estimate the total death toll among Russian combatants to be 47,000 men. That’s three times more than all the Soviet troops who died over 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, and it’s nine time…
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The danger at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
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Moscow and Kyiv have traded allegations that the other side is planning a disastrous attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant that they warn could cause a major radiological event. Last week, Ukrainian President Zelensky warned that Russian occupation forces have placed “objects resembling explosives” on some rooftops at the power station, “p…
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An obituary for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group
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Yevgeny Prigozhin is now (in)famous around the world for mounting a failed mutiny against the Russian military in a last-ditch attempt to avoid being absorbed into it, as the Kremlin reclaims its monopoly on violence and ends an experiment with outsourcing bits of the Ukraine invasion to mercenaries. The Naked Pravda has focused numerous times befo…
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On June 14, the Russian State Duma passed the first reading of a new bill that would essentially ban every aspect of gender transitions, from changing your gender marker in official documents to health care like hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgeries. The only exceptions would be for people with “congenital physiological anomali…
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About a month ago, the Russian authorities outlawed Greenpeace, giving it the same treatment as Meduza, slapping the organization with an “undesirability” label that makes its operations illegal. Greenpeace International “poses a danger to the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order and security,” declared the Prosecutor General’s Office. Its …
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Putin's private life and off-the-books family
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Ten years ago this week, a curious thing happened: during the intermission of a ballet performance at the State Kremlin Palace, Vladimir Putin and his wife of thirty years gave an interview to a TV news crew where they revealed that they were no longer married. It was a brief exchange, but it’s also one of the rare moments in his long presidency wh…
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Pegasus spyware in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict
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Last week, on May 25, the digital-rights group Access Now broke a story revealing that Pegasus spyware was used to hack civil-society figures in Armenia. Notably, these infiltrations took place against the backdrop of the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh — making this investigation’s findings the first documented evidence of Pegasus s…
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After February 24, 2022, when many Western Internet companies withdrew from Russia, and the Russian state itself outlawed other online platforms, the RuNet’s future seemed uncertain. How would Russia’s Internet market develop? Where would the authorities turn for the technology needed to pursue “digital sovereignty” and more advanced censorship too…
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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 …
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Ukraine’s fight inside Russia, behind enemy lines
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Bloggers and news outlets in Russia are abuzz with speculation about what could be the start of Ukraine’s long-awaited spring counteroffensive. Experts have had months to speculate about what shape the counteroffensive might take and what its chances of success are, but recent attacks in Moscow, Crimea, and border regions raise other questions abou…
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How the Putin regime uses the memory of WWII
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Victory in the Second World War, in Europe anyway, came a day later to the Soviet Union. That’s a technicality, of course. Germany’s definitive surrender was signed late in the evening on May 8, and it was already May 9 to the east in Moscow. This month marks the 78th anniversary of that victory, and though the West has enjoyed one more calendar da…
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What human rights activism is still possible in Russia?
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Formal treason charges and denied bail for journalist Evan Gershkovich, a rejected appeal from opposition politician Ilya Yashin (who’s serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for spreading supposed “disinformation” about Russian war atrocities in Ukraine), reportedly new felony charges against jailed anti-corruption icon Alexey Navalny, a…
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Throughout its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly and regularly carried out attacks where it’s either tolerated civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage or even embraced indiscriminate tactics deliberately. Considered alongside what’s happening domestically in Russia, where political repressions underway for years alre…
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A new investigative report published jointly by Meduza and The Bell looks closely at Rostec, one of Russia’s key state corporations, and its campaign to exert control over the public discourse on Telegram about Rostec’s operations and executives. Rostec is responsible for developing, manufacturing, and exporting high-tech products in aviation, mech…
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The Russian military’s growing discipline problems
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In a new investigative report, journalists at Mediazona counted 536 service-related felony cases filed in Russian garrison courts against soldiers since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started last year. Most of these charges involve AWOL offenses, often resulting in probation sentences that allow offenders to return to combat. More serious crim…
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Imaginary wives, seized children, Wagner Group's Pornhub campaign
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Show host Kevin Rothrock revisits noteworthy news stories in Russia from mid-March 2023 and celebrates 99 episodes of The Naked Pravda by reading some listener feedback. Timestamps for this episode: (0:01) Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group paramilitary cartel starts recruiting on Pornhub (2:26) Russia knocks an American UAV into the Black Sea (3:52) …
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Late last month, there was a sudden and brief explosion of news reports in Russia and Ukraine about an ascendant youth movement of violence supposedly built around the subculture of anime fans. According to vague stories in the media, fistfights were breaking out at shopping malls and other public places as part of a transnational campaign by somet…
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The Russian Volunteer Corps and its neo-Nazi leader
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On Thursday morning, March 2, a few dozen armed men crossed over from Ukraine and raided two small towns in the Russian border region of Bryansk. The militants — described as “Ukrainian saboteurs” in hurried Russian news reports and later identified as soldiers in the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps — posed for some pictures, recorded a few breat…
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Amid an escalating public conflict between Russia’s Defense Ministry and Evgeny Prigozhin, The Naked Pravda builds on last year’s episode about the warlord-tycoon, looking more closely at the paramilitary cartel he fronts. To understand how Wagner Group should be defined, why its brutality is so valuable to Moscow, and how its recruitment of prison…
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In early February 2022, as Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán traveled to Moscow on what he described as a “peace mission.” Standing alongside Vladimir Putin at a press conference, Orbán urged other Western countries to adopt a “Hungarian model” of relations with Russia — one sup…
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Russia’s wartime emigration sparks a ‘reckoning’ in Central Asia
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In the initial months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people left Russia. Some were fleeing the war’s economic repercussions or the country’s accelerated descent into authoritarianism, while others saw emigration as a moral necessity. Then, in September, Putin’s mobilization announcement set off a …
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War reporting in Ukraine with The Washington Post’s Kyiv bureau
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On May 11, 2022, The Washington Post announced that it was establishing a new bureau in Kyiv with Isabelle Khurshudyan leading coverage as Ukraine bureau chief. Elements of The Post’s expansive coverage dedicated to the war in Ukraine include a 24-hour live updates page on The Post’s site, a Telegram channel for news updates (now with more than 40,…
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‘Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers, and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine’
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Writer Anna Arutunyan, author of “The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult” (2014), has a new book out about the early pivotal years of Russia’s invasion of the Donbas, titled “Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine.” A longtime journalist, former International Crisis Group senior analyst, and now a Wilson Cen…
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On this week’s episode of The Naked Pravda, Meduza speaks to anthropologist Jeremy Morris about foreign Russia scholars’ growing reliance on state television as a means of monitoring what is thought to be public opinion. Dr. Morris, a professor of Russian and Global Studies in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark, argue…
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Problems with the West’s talk about Ukraine’s ‘decolonization’
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In an article titled “Ukrainian Voices?” recently published in New Left Review, sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko warns that talk in the West about Ukraine’s “decolonization” often focuses too much on “symbols and identity” and not enough on “social transformation.” Representing the war in Ukraine “as an ideological conflict of democracy against auto…
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Given current events in Russia and Ukraine, much of today’s expertise about Russia is again created remotely. It simply isn’t safe for many journalists and researchers to be in the country today due mainly to the militarized censorship of speech related to the invasion of Ukraine. So, what happens when Russia experts are forced to work outside of R…
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The fight for the future of the Russian language
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In a guest essay this week for Meduza, philologist Gasan Gusejnov reflected on the experiences of past “waves” of Russian emigrants and on today’s interactions between the Russian-speaking diaspora and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, explaining how the Putin regime has abused the Russian language by elevating “hateful violence.” Gusejnov also describe…
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A couple of months ago, videos from Russian prisons started appearing online showing a beefy-looking, bald man addressing large crowds of inmates, trying to recruit them as mercenaries to go fight (and quite possibly die, he admitted) in Ukraine. “Do you have anybody who can pull you out of the slammer when you’ve still got 10 years on your sentenc…
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An idiot’s guide to the current state of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
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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 currentl…
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What if Russian commercial aviation cuts too many safety corners?
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It’s an exaggeration to say that Russian aviation has been cut off from the outside world, but the loss of routes to popular Western destinations has squeezed airlines profits while sanctions complicate basic maintenance. In late July, for example, several Russian airlines reportedly advised pilots, not to use their brakes so much when landing, in …
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What if Russia uses a dirty bomb in Ukraine?
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On October 23, following a report in Russia’s state news, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu started calling his counterparts in France, Turkey, the UK, and the United States, warning that Moscow has collected intelligence suggesting that the Ukrainian government is preparing a “provocation” involving the use of a dirty bomb. A day later, Russi…
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Would Russians be able to rationalize the war against Ukraine without gendered rhetoric?
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Now that Vladimir Putin is 70 years old, we’re understandably getting less of his torso in official photographs, but the Kremlin nevertheless relies on tropes of masculinity to validate the regime and its actions abroad, particularly in Ukraine and when it comes to confrontation with the West. This gendered rhetoric resonates with Russians just as …
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Will U.S. partisan politics undermine American support for Ukraine?
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On Tuesday, November 8, the U.S. is holding midterm elections — all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested, in addition to gubernatorial races in 39 states and territories. In all this politicking, mainstream support for Ukraine remains strong, but it was only a few years ago when Donald Tr…
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If China invades Taiwan, what happens to the war in Ukraine?
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The Chinese government has consistently threatened to take Taiwan by force if the government there declares formal independence. American politician Nancy Pelosi completed a two-day trip to Taiwan in early August, enraging Beijing, raising regional tensions, and thrilling Russian state propagandists, who are clearly desperate to draw the two most p…
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When announcing a draft to reinforce Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin accused the West of “nuclear blackmail,” claiming that “high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries” have endorsed the “possibility and admissibility” of using nuclear weapons against Russia. In the same remarks, Putin vowed to use “all available weapon…
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As acting president, elected president, prime minister, and then president again, Vladimir Putin has now ruled Russia for almost 23 years. And it doesn’t look like he plans to retire any time soon. Following amendments to the Russian constitution in 2020, Putin is now able to run in two more presidential elections. This means he could potentially r…
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Meduza’s only English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda, returns for a third season tomorrow on Friday, September 23. Throughout the new season, each show explores a hypothetical event and its potential consequences for Russia and its relationship with the rest of the world. On upcoming episodes, Meduza asks journalists, scholars, and other expert…
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Kadri Liik explains ‘Putin’s archaic war’ and the Russia we lost
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Meduza welcomes European Council on Foreign Relations Senior Policy Fellow Kadri Liik for a discussion about her recent article, “Putin’s Archaic War: Russia’s Newly Outlawed Professional Class – And How It Could One Day Return,” where she argues that the invasion of Ukraine is “effectively de-modernizing Russia” and derailing processes that could …
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Russian film and television before and since the invasion of Ukraine
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After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, five Hollywood giants — Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Sony Pictures, and Paramount — all stopped releasing new films in Russia. Netflix, which was producing multiple shows in Russia for the domestic market, has also suspended all service there. Amazon Prime has halted stream…
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How sanctions against Russia reshape the world
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Earlier this week, the European Union passed a landmark agreement banning most Russian oil imports into the region by the end of the year, though the embargo features a temporary exemption for imports delivered by pipeline in order to overcome opposition from landlocked Hungary. In late May, the U.S. Treasury declined to extend a license that allow…
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Through speeches by political leaders and in television broadcasts that have blanketed the country (as well as new territories recently seized by force), the Kremlin has argued breathlessly that Ukrainian statehood is a historical accident weaponized by Russia’s enemies. This rhetoric, which essentially denies the existence of an independent Ukrani…
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