Kaisa Alliksaar is a social-media producer for the Central Newsroom of RFE/RL in Prague.
What makes Kadyrov's rule so unique in Russia? And how does the Chechen leader continue to act with such impunity?
Inside Georgia, there are two borders that are not even supposed to exist, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Locals who live close to the breakaway South Ossetia or Abkhazia regions face arrest over crossing a sometimes invisible border, even though they are legally still in the same country.
From what the Russian authorities call him (or don't call him) to controversial comments he's made in the past, here are five facts you might not know about the jailed Kremlin critic.
Seventy-five years have passed since the German city of Koenigsberg and its surrounding area became Kaliningrad, now an odd piece of Russia disconnected from the rest of the country. So how did a German region become a Russian exclave? And what role does it play for Russia today?
Ever glanced at a map of the world and stopped to wonder why some countries have seemingly nonsensical shapes? You can find the answers -- or some of them, anyway -- in our ongoing Map Maps series.
When it comes to flying over conflict zones, it turns out everyone's in charge and no one's in charge.
In the second episode of our Mad Maps series, we look at how India ended up with a strange-looking, inconvenient "chicken neck," thanks to the British Empire.
Some countries’ borders don’t seem to make any sense at all. In the first episode of a three-part series we're calling Mad Maps, we take a look at crazy national boundaries in Central Asia, which have the power to spark violence. Why are they so complicated?
The antics of Turkmenistan’s authoritarian leader, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, have recently been the butt of jokes by Western comedians. But the daily realities in the country are grim – and unlikely to change.
In eastern Estonia, it’s possible to briefly enter Russia without any paperwork, but some unusual conditions apply.
It's a "snail" in Italy, but it's a "worm" in Hungary. You might be surprised at how descriptive some of the words for the "at" sign are in other languages.
A set of posters in Estonia appearing to advocate ethnic segregation has stoked anger among members of the country's Russian minority and caused dormant ethnic tensions to resurface ahead of parliamentary elections in March.
