North.Realities is a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
A 29-year-old woman from St. Petersburg has spent over a year in custody over social media posts condemning Moscow's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Viktoria Petrova faces a verdict on December 25, with prosecutors urging the court to sentence her to enforced psychiatric hospitalization.
Ruslan Akhmetshin, a former coordinator for Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny in Arkhangelsk, describes his 30 months in custody, from the "inhumane conditions" of pretrial detention to the dismay he felt upon his release from prison earlier this month.
Finnish media reports on December 8 said the country's Supreme Court refused to extradite to Ukraine Yan Petrovsky, a Russian ultranationalist and former commander of the Rusich saboteur group, which fights alongside Russia's armed forces against Kyiv.
A court of appeals in Russia has cancelled the two-year prison term for the father of a teenage girl who drew pictures against Moscow's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said on November 29 that its officers detained a resident of the northwestern city of Pechory on suspicion of spying for Latvia.
In early November, 19-year-old Russian conscript Andrei Lazhyev died at a naval hospital in Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the illegally annexed territory of Crimea.
A Russian court on November 22 sentenced a 17-year-old to six years in prison for attempting to set fire to two military recruitment offices in protest at Moscow's war in Ukraine.
Boris Vishnevsky, a municipal lawmaker in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, said on November 20 that well-known rights activist Nina Katerli has died at the age of 89.
A court in Russia's second-largest city, St. Peterburg, has sentenced Aleksandra Skochilenko, a 33-year-old Russian artist, to seven years in prison for using price tags in a city store to distribute information about Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A Moscow court on November 16 sentenced to eight years in absentia former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, an associate of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, on a charge of distributing fake information about Russia's armed forces.
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine now 20 months old with no end in sight, many Russians are turning to psychics of various stripes for information about and protection for their loved ones at the front. Participation in online courses for astrology, card-reading, and the like has skyrocketed.
The Riga City Court on November 9 sentenced Janis Adamsons, a former interior minister and an ex-lawmaker from the opposition Social Democratic Saskana (Harmony) party, to 8 1/2 years in prison after finding him guilty of spying for Russia.
A third Russian activist has been released from prison after serving six years in the high-profile Set (Network) case, which rights defenders and opposition activities have called "fabricated."
Many in St. Petersburg's Jewish community are concerned about increasing tensions in Russian society over the Israel-Hamas war -- and the potential consequences of the government's tendency to blame "outside influences" for incidents like an anti-Semitic attack on an airport in Daghestan.
A Russian governor has said the country was not prepared for the war with Ukraine and that the invasion was not in Russia's interests, contradicting Kremlin propaganda.
A small town in Russia’s north is struggling to cope with the return of a pardoned convict who has come back from Ukraine and is now living a street over from the relatives of his victim -- a situation becoming increasingly common as mercenaries recruited from prison return from the war.
The Russian investigative group Proyekt (Project) said on October 11 that several Russian tycoons obtained citizenship from the Carribean island nation of Dominica to evade sanctions imposed on them by the West over their links to the Kremlin and Moscow's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Yury Shevchuk, leader of popular Russian rock group DDT, is being treated in Israel after he experienced a heart attack last month.
For over a year, Russian mercenary groups and the military have been coaxing inmates to fight in Ukraine in exchange for their freedom, if they survive. With no end to the war in sight and Russia’s ability to mobilize constrained by looming elections, the state wants to be able to draft prisoners.
In St. Petersburg, the Wagner Group still offers courses in kamikaze-drone piloting. An RFE/RL reporter took the course and learned how the training is held, and why Wagner warns against signing contracts with the Russian military.
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