Robert Coalson worked as a correspondent for RFE/RL from 2002 to 2024.
In some Volga River reservoirs, the water has receded hundreds of meters from the normal shoreline and many tributaries have been reduced to muddy puddles, raising questions about how one of Russia's most vital river systems is being managed.
Russian lawyer Aleksandr Busarov thought that if he asked Vladimir Putin's government to rehabilitate some of the most notorious criminals of Stalin's regime, they'd have to say "no." But he was wrong.
When the proposed Chigirinsky Nuclear Power Plant was canceled in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the Ukrainian town of Orbita was left to molder away.
With nearly half of young Russians having never heard of the mass political repressions carried out by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, a Moscow museum has produced a graphic novel aimed at sharing stories from some of Russia's darkest times.
A newly declassified 1979 memo gives intriguing details about the Ukrainian KGB's efforts to thwart a "plot by Western security agencies" to undermine the Soviet Union by importing subversive literature into the country under the framework of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.
A group of former poachers in Russia's Altai region is helping activists monitor the endangered snow leopard by placing cameras in remote mountain locations where once they set deadly traps.
The Russian Culture Ministry has ordered regional governments to ensure that exhibitions in museums correspond with "the state's priorities." They have until April 30 to come up with a plan.
Twelve-year-old Pskov youngster Tasya Perchikova's request for assistance for her desperate and impoverished mother has brought the family more trouble than they could imagine.
The gunman's livestream of an attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, showed the suspect blaring a notorious Serbian song from the brutal Balkan wars of the 1990s in the moments before the rampage.
Residents of a Siberian town were outraged when a prominent defense lawyer was found dead, one day after recording a video purportedly showing police investigators beating a detained suspect. The video has not been found.
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently called for an expansion of the government's Rural Doctor program. But many doctors say the program isn't working and are opting out, while others have clashed with local officials who are trying to take back money allocated under the scheme.
The authorities have conducted searches at the homes of 15 activists of a protest movement against Moscow's garbage-disposal plans in the Kolomna area outside Moscow. Public anger is reaching a boiling point as the government pushes ahead to build a controversial waste-incineration plant.
At least 25 cadets in Ulyanovsk have been diagnosed with potentially fatal infections of dog tapeworm. The military academy says they got it from petting a stray dog, but worried parents and others think there's more to the story.
A Chechen man mentioned by name in a Novaya gazeta article about the alleged persecution of gay men by Chechen security forces plans to sue the paper for defamation.
A top Russian prison official rejected allegations that the system still bears the indelible stamp of the notorious Soviet Gulag. Former prisoners and activists counter that the system remains based on violence and contempt for human rights.
RFE/RL spoke with Mikael Wigell about the "strategic partnership" between Moscow and Caracas and Russia's interests in the unfolding political crisis in Venezuela.
A flurry of diplomatic activity has sparked speculation that Russia is preparing to swallow up its smaller neighbor. But many analysts see the sharp exchanges as just another round of a decades-old dance.
Vladivostok journalist Yekaterina Fedorova has gone public with charges that she was raped by a prominent local businessman. She says she feels obligated to speak out as a warning to other women.
Officials and state-friendly media in the western Russian exclave of Kaliningrad have been waging a campaign against historians and museums in what appears to be an effort to erase the region's long German history.
The Far Eastern city of Svobodny is at the heart of one of Russia's ambitious 10-year, economic-development projects. But many locals feel the effort is passing them by.
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