Systema is RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit.
A new interactive investigation by RFE/RL reveals the inner workings of a secretive scheme by Russian military intelligence to recruit fighters for the Kremlin's war on Ukraine under the guise of a fictitious private military company.
Russia maintains manpower and avoids a politically risky call-up by offering contract soldiers what the Kremlin calls “very, very attractive” terms for signing up to fight in Ukraine. But RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, Systema, found numerous cases in which the promised benefits never came.
After the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a purportedly private military group called Redut has widely been tipped as Wagner’s potential successor as Russia’s key mercenary force. A new RFE/RL investigation reveals that Redut is, in reality, a secretive network operated by Russian military intelligence.
Moscow is making it easier to send children taken from Ukraine to orphanages and families in Russia -- and harder for their real families to bring them home. An RFE/RL investigation reveals details about the process that has earned President Vladimir Putin an arrest warrant for war crimes.
A window into the level of cooperation between China and Russia in censoring their respective Internets and monitoring dissent was unveiled in files from closed-door meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China and Roskomnadzor that were obtained by RFE/RL.
A massive leak of internal correspondence and documents shows how a little-known Russian government agency keeps a watchful eye on the Internet -- for opposition protests, for investigations on official corruption, for discussion of the Ukraine war -- and how it works to censor it for Russians.
