Robert Coalson is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL who covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.
Former Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko died in London 15 years ago of radiation poisoning. His widow has been working ever since to make sure his life and murder are not forgotten.
In recent days, several Russian political activists from Murmansk to Khabarovsk have been sentenced to compulsory psychiatric or other medical treatment. Human rights groups have been warning for years about the increased use of such Soviet-style practices as a tool against dissent.
Organizers of a conference of independent Russian lawmakers have been sentenced after police broke up the event, claiming it violated new anti-COVID restrictions. The lawmakers deny they broke the rules, and say they were put in place at the last minute to stop the opposition from organizing.
After failing dozens of times to pass a law criminalizing domestic violence because of resistance from socially conservative Orthodox Christian forces, Russian activists and their allies in the State Duma are mounting yet another try. And, once again, they are meeting intense opposition from those who say the law would be a Western cultural imposition that would undermine the traditional Russian family.
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.
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.
Newly declassified documents from the KGB archive in Ukraine shed light on how one leg of a 1947 journey to the Soviet Union by U.S. writer John Steinbeck and noted war photojournalist Robert Capa went down.
