North.Realities is a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
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.
Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has cost an unknown number of lives in the tiny Saami-populated village of Lovozero on Russia's Kola Peninsula -- a drain that some fear could undermine the indigenous hamlet's sustainability.
Longtime Russian prisoner-rights advocate Olga Romanova tells RFE/RL that Russia's prisons are inefficient, archaic, and cruel, but they suit the social and political needs of President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian system. Particularly during the invasion of Ukraine.
Prosecutors asked the Tver district court in Moscow during the retrial of noted protest artist Pavel Krisevich to sentence the defendant to five years in prison over a so-called "suicide" performance in which he fired blanks from a pistol in Moscow's Red Square.
The director of the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has been found dead in a suburb, local media reports said.
Since they learned of his death in May, Artyom Ponomaryov's widow and mother-in-law have been hunting for information of where his remains are kept and often joined forces with other families from their home village that are also trying to locate their loved ones' bodies.
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