Anastasia Vladimirova @stasia_writes

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has become the second largest destination for immigrants, after the United States. Unlike many Western...

On Sunday, March 26, tens of thousands of people came out onto the streets of almost 100 Russian cities, from urban Moscow to the far-east Vladivostok, to...

On Saturday, March 25, Belarus came under the most repressive crackdown seen in seven years. More than 700 people were detained during afternoon protests,...

Last Saturday, March 18, marked three years since Russia annexed Crimea. Just a few months after pro-Europe protests, known as Euromaidan, started in...

For about a month now, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has been investigating alleged Russian interference into the presidential election in November...

On Friday, March 3, Mehman Huseynov, Azeri human rights defender and journalist, was arrested by Surakhansky district court of Baku and sentenced to two years...

Over the past two years, a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “The New Cold War” has become a go-to term amongst Western...

On Saturday, February 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order temporarily recognizing passports and other documents held by residents of...

During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks, an online platform for whistleblowers, released thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee...

“Post-Soviet Russia is a spectacular modern case of what happens when that basic trust between the individual and the institution, any institution, breaks...

Last Friday, January 28, the Russian parliament voted 380 to 3 in favor of new legislation that decriminalizes domestic violence against family members. The...

Over the past several weeks, journalists and human rights defenders reporting on the North Caucasus have experienced a spike in violence and threats. On...

Last Friday, January 6, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a new report about Russia’s alleged influence on America's 2016...

On Thursday, December 29, the Obama administration announced its decision to expel thirty-five Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and...

On December 22, the Moscow District Military Court sentenced a twenty-one-year old former Moscow State University student, Varvara Karaulova, to 4.5 years in a...

Since November, the world has been watching Aleppo turn into a field of death, as the Assad regime killed civilians trapped in the besieged city with help from...

As a Russian living and working abroad, I frequently engage in political conversations about my country. As such, I often have to respond to the presumption...

Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union fell apart. Its practice of persecuting dissidents and placing them in mental institutions is, however, alive and well...

In 2011, when protests swept the Middle East and North Africa, India faced its own revolution. "India Against Corruption," a grassroots anti-corruption...

The results of the 2016 presidential election had not been announced yet, but a group of Vladimir Putin supporters, gathered at the Union Jack pub in Moscow,...

On October 29, Moscovites gathered at Solovetsky Stone, a monument located in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, right across from the Federal Security Services...

Last Friday, October 28, Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in a vote prompted by the country’s foreign policy toward...

Last Monday, October 17, the Kremlin-sponsored broadcasting network RT – also known as Russia Today – reported that the National Westminster Bank would...

Mustafa Dzhemilev is on the federal wanted list. He is a long-time Soviet dissident and the historic leader of the Crimean Tatars who has been barred by...

Last Friday, October 7, marked the tenth anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder. An investigative journalist from Russia and an outspoken critic of...

Last week’s renewed abortion debate in Russia underscores an increasing atmosphere of anti-women rhetoric amongst Russian politicians and religious...

In their recent book “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War,” Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab, two British authors of Syrian descent,...

In March 2014, I visited Mafraq, a Jordanian city located about six kilometers away from the border with Syria. Since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in...

Last week, a Greenpeace-organized, volunteer-effort to extinguish fires in Russia’s Krasnodar region raised suspicions among nationalist-minded...

On September 1, 2004, Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, was forever shaken by a tragic and deadly attack. On that day, a group of Chechen rebels took...

On Monday, August 29, readers of and subscribers to The New Times, an independent Russian political magazine, will not be able to buy new issues of the...

Last week’s talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan marked a substantial turnaround in Russia-Turkey...

While the world has kept a close eye on Turkey following the July 15 attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, some analysts and bloggers have...

On Friday, July 15, a group of military officials attempted a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Almost immediately, Erdogan’s leadership declared...

For several years now, Russian opposition activists, journalists, and politicians have tried to envision their country without President Vladimir Putin's...

On July 7, President Vladimir Putin signed a package of controversial anti-terrorist amendments into law. The package is known as the “Yarovaya...

Ever since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Jordan has taken in almost 650,000 Syrian refugees. Today, Syrians from cities like Aleppo, Homs, and...

Over the past two years, hundreds of thousands of refugees have come to Europe fleeing their homes in war-torn Syria and Iraq. Faced with the largest refugee...

On June 10, Russian journalist Evgeny Kiselyov discovered that FSB, the Russian security service, had opened a criminal investigation against him on charges of...

Following the Soviet Union's fall, Russia experienced an exciting, albeit brief, flirtation with democracy. While it lasted only a handful of years, Russia’s...

Over the past year, the Syrian civil war has echoed across the shores of Europe, as an unprecedented number of refugees, mostly Syrians, have made their way...

A number of rallies took place around the world on May 26 and 27 in support of jailed Azerbaijani investigative reporter, Khadija Ismayilova. As...

On May 13, 2016, one of the few remaining independent Russian news companies, RBC, lost its three editors as a result of alleged political pressure from the...

On May 12, a Russian-run court in Crimea charged Ilmi Umerov, the Deputy Head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, with extremism for making public...

Every year, on Victory Day, May 9, Russians don a strip of black-and-orange fabric to commemorate the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. The piece of...

Russians have long associated the word ‘fascist’ with horrors committed by the Nazis during the Second World War. But, in today’s Russia, the word has...

In her latest piece for the Intersection Project, Tatiana Stanovaya asks “Are the Russian authorities ready for revolution?” A political scientist and...

When Moscow authorities evicted the Learning Center for Refugee Children from the premises it had occupied for nearly twenty years, its volunteers kept...

Last Tuesday, April 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the creation of the National Guard, a new military body headed by his former bodyguard, Viktor...

Last week, Sophia A. McClennon, Director of Penn State’s Center for Global Studies, wrote in The Conversation about cable news channel Russia Today (RT)....

After two terror attacks hit Brussels on Tuesday, March 22, Russian officials did not express condolences or compassion for those affected by the events....

After five and a half months in Syria, Russian troops are leaving the country. In a surprise statement announcing the withdrawal on Monday, March 14,...

Last Wednesday, March 9, a group of masked men attacked eight human rights defenders and journalists, including two foreign reporters, at the...

On Monday, February 29, an unspeakable tragedy took place in Moscow. A thirty-nine-year-old woman from Uzbekistan, Gulchekhra Bobokulova, was detained at...

Crimea’s Tatars, a largely secular Muslim minority of about 300,000 people, are suffering a great deal because of their resistance to Russia’s occupation...

In Russia, non-governmental groups that receive foreign funding are subject to scrutiny. Laws, which date back to 2012, require domestic human rights...