Robert Coalson worked as a correspondent for RFE/RL from 2002 to 2024.
Long-distance truck drivers across Russia have begun a new series of protests against a national highway toll system that was implemented last year.
Russian Orthodox conservatives have asked Natalya Poklonskaya -- formerly the chief Russian prosecutor in the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea -- to launch an investigation into a forthcoming film about a love affair between a ballerina and the future Tsar Nicholas.
In a development that hints at the rising influence of the Orthodox Church in Russia, Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin has called for the development of a "postsecular" legal framework that would seemingly roll back rights gains by women, sexual minorities, and others.
Russian journalist Dmitry Steshin has prompted the closure of a St. Petersburg restaurant and sent its chef into hiding by taking to Twitter to attack the chef’s criticism of a top separatist commander in Ukraine who was killed this week. Now he has a young man in Voronezh in the crosshairs.
In a church last month on the coast of Montenegro, uniformed Cossacks from across the Balkans gathered to form a new "Balkan Cossack Army." The movement is directed by Russia and concerns have been raised about its intentions.
Several dozen people in Moscow have attended a somber memorial service to mark the 10th anniversary of the murder of prominent investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
As the Nobel Committee prepares to announce the 2016 literature prize winner, RFE/RL spoke with the 2015 laureate, Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus, about the increasing militarization in Russia and about her next projects.
When the next manned rocket blasts off for the International Space Station, a box containing relics of St. Serafim of Sarov will be strapped to the chest of the Russian cosmonaut commanding the mission. Serafim's adventure highlights the expanding influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In Surgut, nationalist activists have installed a bust of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin near the spot where a local group has been trying for a year to erect a monument to his millions of victims. The city in western Siberia is home to thousands who are descended from people Stalin exiled there during his reign of terror.
A Russian statistician has released an election analysis that he claims shows the ruling United Russia party was given as many as 12 million extra votes in the September 18 State Duma elections.
Russians vote on September 18 for a new State Duma in an election that appears somewhat more democratic than the 2011 process but that has been carefully crafted to produce an essentially similar result.
Although Russia's current Duma campaign is as strictly managed an affair as previous ones under President Vladimir Putin, it is notable for one landmark: It is the first time in modern Russian history that openly gay men have run for the nation's legislature.
The heavy-handed governor of Russia’s Samara Oblast is under pressure to deliver the vote for the ruling United Russia party in a region noted for its support of the Communists. So he’s turning to the CIA for help, casting the September 18 contest as a stark battle between United Russia and the U.S. intelligence agency.
Russian journalists have posted online a photograph they say shows a top Russian general presenting a fake quotation attributed to former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney that says Washington aims to "destroy Russia."
By labeling Russia's only respected public-opinion pollster a "foreign agent," the Kremlin has made it much more difficult for outside observers to assess the government's claims about the country's direction.
Fazil Iskander, a powerful and prolific Soviet-era writer who made his native Abkhazia region of Georgia a frequent subject, has died at the age of 87. "Through the tiny mirror of Abkhazia, he managed to reflect an entire epoch of the Soviet Union," fellow writer Andrei Bitov said.
Two top U.S. diplomats working to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine have accused Russia of continuing to supply separatist fighters with fuel and weapons and creating a "deteriorating security situation" in the region that is as bad as it was a year ago.
All this month, women in Ukraine, Russia, and other countries have been posting stories of the sexual violence they have endured. In Russia, the harrowing accounts of what comes across as pervasive harassment and abuse have provoked a wide-ranging social self-examination that seems unwelcome to the ruling political and religious elites.
For the fourth straight year, members of Kyiv's LGBT community plan to hold a March of Equality. And for the fourth straight year, counterdemonstrators are threatening to stop them by any means, including violence.
For a dozen years, activists in Saransk have been calling for a monument to citizens executed during Josef Stalin's Great Terror. This week, they got one -- courtesy of the Interior Ministry -- that highlights the "tragic fate" of their republic's secret police at the time.
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