A police officer in Yekaterinburg shot a 17-year-old while detaining him on suspicion of setting fire to police vehicles, the Interior Ministry’s Sverdlovsk regional directorate told Vecherniye Vedomosti.
Two police vehicles caught fire on the grounds of Police Station No. 3 overnight on October 15. The teenager was found at the scene. An officer used his service weapon while detaining him, acting “in accordance with the law,” the Interior Ministry said. The teenager was grazed and was not taken to a hospital.
The Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal investigation into the teenager on suspicion of sabotage. Investigators allege that he set the vehicles on fire “on instructions from handlers” with whom he had been exchanging messages online.
The teenager’s first name is Anatoly. He is a first-year student at a vocational college, training to become a computer operator, and had recently been working part-time as a courier for a cafe. Police had previously placed him under the supervision of juvenile officers for smoking at school.
Police are also looking into whether the teenager was manipulated by scammers.
At least 240 teenagers in Russia have been detained on terrorism or sabotage charges since the start of the war, according to Mediazona’s May 2026 tally. In most cases — 205 — the suspects said they had been looking for an easy way to earn some extra money. Six teenagers committed arson after being manipulated by scammers, while five said they opposed the war. In the remaining cases, the motive was unclear.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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St. Petersburg authorities have barred foreign nationals with labor patents, a type of work authorization, from jobs in health care, hairstyling, beauty services, retail, and sports and fitness services. The ban will remain in effect through the end of 2026.
City authorities said the restrictions are needed to “combat off-the-books employment.” The ban does not apply to citizens of Eurasian Economic Union member states (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan) or to foreign nationals holding work permits rather than labor patents.
City authorities introduced a similar ban for taxi drivers and couriers last year. Those restrictions were extended through 2026.
Russian authorities began tightening migration policy after the March 2024 terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall outside Moscow. Among other measures, they made it harder to obtain Russian residence permits through a fast-track process based on marriage, approved new rules for expelling migrants, and banned schools from admitting migrant children who lack Russian-language proficiency.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Russia’s State Duma has passed a bill in its first reading that would allow conscripts to serve in military units of the Emergencies Ministry’s Federal Fire Service.
An explanatory note accompanying the bill says it would help reduce the service’s “existing staffing shortage.”
The service’s military units are currently deployed only in closed and federal territories and at high-priority and high-security facilities. The bill would expand their area of responsibility in light of the “global geopolitical situation” and “potential threats from unfriendly countries,” as well as to “protect citizens and economic assets,” including “in armed conflict zones.”
Parlamentskaya Gazeta reported that the bill would authorize these units to fight fires and conduct rescue operations in ordinary towns and villages and at civilian facilities.
However, the newspaper said the bill would bar conscripts serving in firefighting units from being sent to the “special military operation” zone or to regions where a counterterrorism operation regime is in effect.
Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov first spoke in February about plans to assign conscripts to serve as firefighters. The ministry hopes this will address problems caused by an “exodus of personnel” due to low pay.
The Interior Ministry and the Federal Penitentiary Service have also reported staffing shortages. iStories reported that these shortages have worsened during the Russia–Ukraine war. People who previously would have joined these agencies are now signing contracts with the Defense Ministry because fighting in the war pays more.
Ukraine strikes targets not only on the front lines and in nearby regions but across Russia. Drones attack oil facilities, warehouses, and data centers across Russia. The strikes often cause major fires.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Life abroad is full of challenges. Along with learning unfamiliar laws and customs, studying a language, and building a network from scratch, Russians abroad need to be ready to defend their rights — for example, if a bank unfairly freezes their account or authorities deny them documents. (Problems with documents are becoming more common as countries around the world tighten immigration rules.) Many emigrants feel they’re entirely on their own. That’s not quite true. Meduza has selected several initiatives and organizations that help Russians who have left the country or want to leave.
An important note: This article includes the discriminatory designations Russian authorities have imposed on independent organizations, since many of the people who turn to them are still in Russia or travel there periodically. Good luck, and take care!
Kovcheg launched shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. It started with a legal aid bot on Telegram, but soon began offering psychological counseling and then opened shelters in Yerevan and Istanbul.
Today, Kovcheg is the largest organization helping Russians abroad. It offers language courses and helps people train for new careers. It also publishes guides for Russians in various countries on obtaining legal residency and citizenship, starting a business, finding work, applying to universities, and more.
Kovcheg also runs more than 50 chat groups focused on different countries and professional fields, along with Kovcheg.Business, a community that holds in-person meetups.
This organization helps LGBTQ people. It provides emergency housing in the EU, legal aid, and psychological counseling. It also helps people evacuate and supports political prisoners.
In 2022, the Free Russia Foundation (designated an “undesirable” and “extremist” organization in Russia) launched Reforum Space. It has three locations — in Berlin, Vilnius, and Paris — open to anti-war activists, independent journalists, human rights defenders, cultural professionals, and scholars.
Reforum Space offers free coworking spaces and video studios, along with lectures and consultations on settling into a new country, dealing with bureaucracy, and completing paperwork.
Other groups helping emigrants in various countries: The Mir Vsem (Peace Unto All) movement supports clergy in Russia and abroad who have faced persecution for their anti-war stance.
The inTransit project evacuates people from Russia to Georgia and Armenia, as well as Montenegro and Kazakhstan. It also helps them obtain documents so they can later emigrate to EU countries.
Other groups helping people evacuate from Russia: NC SOS Crisis Group (designated “extremist” in Russia), Marem (which serves residents of the North Caucasus), and Rapid Unit (which evacuates activists, journalists, and human rights defenders).
Founded in 1998, this is one of Armenia’s leading independent human rights organizations. It provides legal aid to Russians detained by Armenian authorities at Moscow’s request.
Grigory Sverdlin, the former director of the homeless assistance organization Nochlezhka, launched the project in September 2022 to help Russians avoid mobilization or desert the military. The organization, Idite Lesom (“Get Lost”), works with volunteer lawyers, psychologists, and others to help people live at addresses other than those where they are officially registered, leave Russia illegally, flee military training units, and surrender on the battlefield. More than 85,000 people have turned to the organization for assistance over the past four years. Russian authorities labeled it a “foreign agent” in 2025.
In April 2025, politician and former political prisoner Ilya Yashin said he was launching a public assistance office to help Russians in Europe. He said the team works much as his office did when he was a municipal council member in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district.
The office promises to help Russians understand the law, draft requests to officials, and prepare affidavits for court.
Other projects providing legal aid to emigrants in Europe: Iskra, which specializes in defending people’s rights in dealings with European banks.
The Russian Anti-War Committee (designated an “undesirable” and “terrorist” organization in Russia) was formed in late February 2022, bringing together opposition politicians, activists, and journalists. According to its website, the organization opposes the war, collects humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and helps Russians resolve problems they face abroad.
One of its initiatives, Consuls of the Russian Anti-War Committee, is intended to help Russians in emergencies — for example, when they face deportation to Russia or are denied temporary or permanent residency or refugee status.
The Consuls work in the United Kingdom, Germany, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, France, Montenegro, Switzerland, Sweden, Estonia, and the United States.
This human rights organization was established with support from Sergey Lagodinsky, a Russian-speaking German politician and member of the European Parliament. Gorizonty helps Russians obtain humanitarian visas to Germany, France, and other EU countries. By mid-2024, more than 600 people had received visas to Europe with its help.
Other groups helping in emergencies: Reporters Without Borders (for journalists; designated an “undesirable” organization in Russia) and Artists at Risk (for cultural professionals).
This volunteer organization (designated “undesirable” in Russia) was founded by Ksenia Maximova, a local council member in London. It helps Ukraine and political prisoners in Russia, as well as Russians in the United Kingdom.
In 2025, the organization secured the creation of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Russia and Democracy, whose work includes addressing problems faced by Russians in exile.
That same year, the Russian Democratic Society launched an emotional support group to help people adjust to life in a new country.
This nonprofit brings together Russian emigrants in the United States “who strive for freedom and democracy in Russia, as well as for the victory of Ukraine in the war.” It has been designated an “undesirable” organization in Russia, and two of its leaders have been added to Russia’s list of “terrorists and extremists.”
The organization runs chat groups in nine cities: Miami, Sacramento, New York, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. It regularly offers advice on immigration rules and obtaining political asylum in the United States.
After U.S. immigration authorities made it harder to obtain asylum, Russian America for Democracy in Russia also began helping Russians held in immigration detention centers. It looks for lawyers, raises money for legal aid, and helps people stay in touch with their families.
The charity Ours in the USA grew out of a chat group for Russian-speaking LGBTQ people in the United States. It defends the rights of Russian queer refugees seeking asylum in the country.
The Ours in the USA team promises to help Russians prepare the documents needed to apply for asylum. The organization also provides emergency housing and submits reports to the U.N. on violations of queer people’s rights.
The nonprofit Russian Seattle for Freedom was founded in Seattle in 2023. It describes itself as “a group of concerned Russians” who collectively oppose repression by the Russian state. Its members run a chat group where they answer emigrants’ questions about everyday life and bureaucracy.
Russian Seattle for Freedom also works with lawyers who help people obtain asylum.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
On October 14, EU officials discussed new visa restrictions for Russians. At a meeting in Brussels, the Council of the EU’s visa policy working group considered issuing Russian citizens a particular type of visa for “nonessential” travel, meaning tourism. These limited territorial validity (LTV) visas allow holders to visit only one or several countries, rather than the entire Schengen zone.
Germany proposed the measure, according to the news outlet Rapporteur, which cited a document its correspondent reviewed. The proposal has already drawn criticism within the EU, this time from Ireland. The document is not publicly available, so it is not yet possible to say how widely these visas might be used or what criteria would apply, if they are issued at all.
What is clear, however, is that the proposal comes amid broader tensions. In January 2026, the European Commission proposed developing visa restrictions for citizens of countries engaged in “hostile activities against the EU.” This could even involve amending the Visa Code, a cornerstone of EU legislation. In recent months, a growing number of European countries have called for tougher measures. On October 11, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo went as far as proposing a complete halt to issuing tourist visas to Russians.
What exactly are LTV visas?
Unlike standard Schengen visas, they do not allow holders to travel freely throughout the Schengen zone. Holders can visit only the country or countries explicitly listed on the visa sticker in their passport. Even transit through other Schengen countries is prohibited. For example, someone with an LTV visa valid only for Italy would be breaking the rules by visiting neighboring Switzerland.
These visas are nothing new: Russians have been receiving them for a long time. In recent years, they have become much more common. In 2025 alone, 12,000 Russian citizens received LTV visas. According to the human rights organization The Ark, these visas are most commonly issued to holders of Russia’s five-year international passports, which are nonbiometric. That is because 15 Schengen countries have now stopped recognizing nonbiometric passports.
Hi, I’m Vladislav Gorin.
I’m the host of Meduza’s daily Russian-language news podcast. This summer, the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me — not for committing a crime, but for telling the truth about Russia and its war against Ukraine.
Because the Kremlin has branded me a criminal, I can’t go home. I also can’t safely travel to countries like Turkey — even though it’s a NATO member — because I could be arrested and extradited to Russia. I can’t even renew my passport at the consulate anymore.
None of this is going to stop me. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia who don’t want this war and who still believe in freedom and democracy, and they deserve access to independent journalism. Please support Meduza so I can keep reaching them.
What is the point, exactly? Would this really make the EU safer?
The official justification for the proposed restrictions is security. The European Commission previously promised to tighten visa rules for Russians at the request of a group of Schengen countries, citing threats of espionage, property damage, and sabotage.
But The Ark’s founder, lawyer Anastasia Burakova, questioned how effective the proposed restrictions would be. “This is meant to reassure people in countries that are under greater pressure. But it won’t make any difference to security at all,” she told Meduza.
The EU’s main argument does not hold up. According to The Ark, European intelligence services regularly provide evidence that contradicts it: “Moscow carries out sabotage using citizens of EU countries, citizens of countries whose passports allow visa-free entry to the Schengen zone, and Russians who moved to the EU before February 2022 and obtained residence permits long ago.” In most cases, tourist visa holders have nothing to do with sabotage.
Given the divisions within the EU, however, “visas with limited territorial validity could be acceptable to countries that oppose a complete ban on tourist travel,” Burakova said.
Suppose I get an LTV visa. How would they know where I am if there are no border checks between EU countries?
First, for Russian travelers, visiting a country not listed on an LTV visa would break the law and carry consequences, Burakova said: “If they catch you, they’ll fine you and deport you. You won’t be able to leave the EU without consequences either if you fly out of a different country.”
Second, while there are generally no border checks between EU countries, they can be reintroduced temporarily in certain circumstances. Germany did this ahead of the Euro 2024 soccer championship, for example. Just recently, in August 2026, Italy introduced checks on arrivals from Spain because of an influx of migrants into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. You cannot predict when, where, or why border guards might appear.
Third, you could also be “found out” whenever you need to prove your identity and your right to be in the country: during a police spot check, when checking into a hotel, when an airline checks your documents, when seeking hospital care, and so on.
But if these visas are issued widely, wouldn’t tracking people’s movements require new infrastructure? That would probably take a lot of time and money…
It is impossible to say right now; we have no details. But border checks across the entire EU just for Russians are unlikely. Burakova is confident that LTV visas could be issued on a large scale under the current system, without major expense or lengthy preparations.
It is also unclear how quickly the new rules would take effect, if adopted, and whom they would affect. Stricter visa criteria also affect people trying to leave Russia for humanitarian reasons. They cannot count on the exemptions European authorities have promised, either. Burakova wrote that the exemptions for relatives of EU residents, dissidents, journalists, and activists under the previous ban on issuing multiple-entry visas have existed only on paper for the past 11 months. Authorities have yet to establish clear requirements, document checklists, or safe application procedures for these groups.
For example, Schengen countries issued more than 40,000 limited territorial validity visas to Kosovo residents in 2011, The Insider reported, citing a European Commission report. This was because some EU countries did not recognize Kosovo’s independence or its passports. Visa-free travel between the EU and Kosovo has been in place since 2024, so the practice has ended.
Burakova noted, however, citing human rights advocates, that back when Kosovo residents needed visas, they were also issued standard single-entry and multiple-entry visas. So this precedent does not tell us what to expect, either.
When will we know whether the new rules will be introduced?
It is hard to say.
The European Council will meet on October 15–16. The proposal will likely be discussed publicly at that meeting, along with a complete ban on tourist visas for Russians, which Finland’s prime minister has promised to raise. Meduza will keep following the story.
A court in Kazakhstan has ordered rapper Navai held in pretrial detention for two months in a drug smuggling case, Baza reported. The Korday District Court issued the order against Navai Bakirov on October 15.
Bakirov was detained at a checkpoint on October 14 after drugs were found in his car as he entered Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan. Baza reported that officers found 10 grams (about 0.35 ounces) of marijuana, while other sources put the amount at 2.5 grams (about 0.09 ounces) of drugs.
According to Baza, the rapper admitted during questioning that he had bought the drugs in Bishkek.
He was traveling to Kazakhstan to perform at a concert in Astana on October 14.
Kyrgyzstan’s State Border Service has launched an internal inquiry after Navai was detained with drugs following his border crossing, TASS reported. The inquiry aims “to establish all the circumstances surrounding his border screening.” The border service said that if it finds any violations, it will take “appropriate action in accordance with the law” against those responsible.
Navai Bakirov is best known as a member of HammAli & Navai, a hookah rap duo active from 2016 to 2025. After the duo split up, Bakirov launched a solo career.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Russian authorities did not anticipate Ukrainian strikes on warehouses belonging to the online marketplaces Wildberries and Ozon, Vladimir Putin said at a congress of the business association Business Russia.
“I’m aware of the problems you mentioned — unfortunately, our platforms, Wildberries and Ozon, have come under enemy attack. By the way, they keep taking steps that, frankly, we probably should have anticipated, but we thought those things wouldn’t occur to them. They did,” Putin said in response to Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim, who mentioned Ukrainian strikes on the company’s warehouses.
Putin said that once Russia “starts responding” to such strikes, Ukraine turns “to its sponsors to ask them to put pressure on us and stop us.” He said the same thing happened with energy facilities and called Ukraine’s latest strikes on Russian oil refineries “insignificant.”
Russia has already begun responding to these attacks, Putin said: “They made the first move. We started responding. Now they’re squealing in the same way about energy facilities, too, and about other sites, including data centers and so on. They started it. They shouldn’t have started it.”
This was Putin’s first comment on strikes on data centers, the news outlet Agentstvo reported. The context, however, leaves it unclear whether he meant Ukrainian strikes on Yandex and Sber data centers or similar Russian attacks.
In September, Russia attacked several Ukrainian data centers, and the Russian Defense Ministry threatened Kyiv with a “digital detox.” On October 10, after Ukrainian forces had begun attacking Yandex, Russia struck a data center belonging to the Ukrainian provider Tenet in Odesa and UkrSibbank’s “ATM” facility in Kyiv.
On October 13, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the government was discussing the attacks on Russian data centers. The following day, Putin held a meeting on cybersecurity.
During the public portion of the meeting, Putin said he expected participants to put forward proposals “that will improve digital security.” He said cyberthreats were reaching a new level “against a backdrop of direct and hybrid aggression from abroad.” He did not mention the strikes on data centers.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Ukrainian attacks on Yandex’s data centers have hit key growth areas for Russia’s leading IT company: search and AI. All three Yandex supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin — likely suffered serious damage from fire and smoke. Soot may have reached their electronics through cooling systems that use outside air. Cleaning could take months, while replacing damaged NVIDIA chips could take years because of equipment shortages. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. Now Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the AI race as early as November. T-invariant spoke to computing specialists about the potential consequences of the Ukrainian military’s attacks for Yandex, both as a business and as Russia’s IT leader. Meduza is publishing the article in full.
All three Yandex supercomputers are out of service indefinitely following drone attacks on the company’s data centers. The first attack came on the night of October 7–8 in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. The facility houses Chervonenkis, the most powerful of Russia’s publicly disclosed supercomputers, as well as Lyapunov, which ranks third. The following night, Ukrainian forces attacked the data center in Kaluga — Yandex’s largest and one of the largest in Russia. On the night of October 10–11, an attack hit the data center in Vladimir, which houses the Galushkin supercomputer.
Four specialists interviewed by T-invariant are convinced that the company’s computing capacity has suffered serious damage. In their view, the main reason the equipment is vulnerable to drone attacks and the resulting fires is that it relies on direct free cooling, which uses outside air. Intake fans draw the air through filters before it passes through server racks.
Even if the flames did not reach the supercomputer racks themselves, soot- and ash-filled air could have reached the server boards, depositing tiny particles on the circuit board laminate. Much also depends on the condition of the filters. Carbon conducts electricity, and the conductive traces on these boards are so closely spaced that the particles act as conductive “bridges” between contacts, causing widespread short circuits and burning out motherboards. Combustion products can also corrode conductors and electrical connections.
In the summer of 2026, Yandex said it was beginning to introduce liquid-cooling systems:
To integrate the technology into existing data centers that use free cooling, the company’s engineers developed a specialized solution: sidecars. These are additional racks equipped with liquid-to-air heat exchangers. They allow liquid cooling to be introduced without extensive, costly building renovations. Combining air and liquid cooling effectively regulates the temperature of heavily loaded racks and allows infrastructure to adapt more quickly to the needs of internal services and external partners.
The experts interviewed by T-invariant said liquid-cooling components offer better protection in a fire, but Yandex is unlikely to have completed the conversion at all its data centers.
One expert who works for a global AI giant was skeptical of the technology Yandex uses to cool its supercomputers. “Nobody in their right mind has used free cooling for ages,” he told T-invariant. Liquid cooling is the main choice, used by NVIDIA, among others. Immersion cooling is less common.
The specialists estimate that cleaning smoke residue and soot from supercomputer components could take up to six months. If components need replacing, including expensive and, above all, scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents, restoring the computers to full operation could take one to two years.
Yandex has not commented on the condition of its supercomputers since the attacks. T-invariant asked leading Russian supercomputing specialists, both those working in Russia and those who have left to work for global AI giants, for a detailed assessment of the situation and the risks and challenges facing Yandex. All asked to remain anonymous.
Why the supercomputers’ condition is the most pressing issue right now
The strike on Russia’s IT leader has sent shock waves across the Russian internet. For more than a week, Russian users have faced disruptions to services run by Yandex’s many cloud partners and other business customers, as well as outages affecting its own services, particularly Yandex Disk and Yandex Pay. The Russian internet is full of videos from users who have lost access — perhaps temporarily — to their data or money.
For Yandex itself, however, the main problem following the Ukrainian military’s attacks on its data centers is the partial or total loss of computing capacity. This matters for at least two reasons. The disabled data centers will hurt Yandex’s market capitalization, but more importantly, these problems could set back its AI development, on which its core business depends, by months or years.
After the first drone strikes on Yandex’s data centers on October 8 and 9, many investors remained moderately optimistic about the company: cloud services account for a small share of revenue, and workloads can be redistributed among data centers. At one point, its share price fell by a few percent. The third attack and the prospect of further Ukrainian drone strikes prompted more pessimistic financial forecasts.
Yandex does not report AI results separately in its financial statements, so its “Search and AI” segment provides the best indication. It has the highest adjusted EBITDA margin of any segment Yandex reports: 46.3% in the second quarter of 2026 and 44.8% for the first half of the year. By comparison, the “Urban Services” segment had a margin of 16%, while the entire B2B segment, including Yandex Cloud, contributes substantially less than search and AI. “Search and AI” also generated the most adjusted EBITDA in absolute terms.
The financial statements show that AI is already making a measurable contribution to advertising revenue growth. According to the company, its ARGUS recommendation technology accounted for nearly half of that growth in the second quarter of 2026. Although Yandex does not disclose the profitability of its AI products separately, its reporting shows how important AI is to the company’s finances.
“Yandex remains among the first companies worldwide to expand trials of AI advertising for businesses through Alice AI in search, on the website, and in the app. These formats take a fundamentally new approach to audience targeting. The algorithms consider not just the query but the full context of the conversation with Alice AI. This makes it possible to identify a user’s potential interests before they formulate a specific query.
“Advertising on AI platforms is already delivering measurable results: the cost of acquiring a customer is comparable to that of advertising in search. In chats with Alice AI, the advertising system has already displayed ads from more than 460,000 advertisers — three-quarters of all advertisers on the platform.
“Alice AI remains the most popular AI tool among Russians. In the second quarter, the number of users who complete tasks and chat with Alice AI each week rose 39% from the previous quarter to 33.2 million. The number of active Alice smart speakers each month increased 31% year over year to 22.5 million. Users are also increasingly using multiple devices: the number of people who own two or more speakers rose 44% to 4.7 million,” Yandex’s financial report says.
The main risk clearly concerns AI. The three supercomputers at two data centers power the development of the company’s neural networks and other parts of its AI ecosystem. If computing operations have to be suspended to clean up the damage from fire and smoke, the infrastructure responsible for nearly half of the growth in advertising revenue will be out of action for months. If the supercomputers are even partially damaged, development will be slowed for years.
One reason is sanctions restricting shipments of NVIDIA A100 accelerators to Russia. Obtaining them is extraordinarily expensive and difficult, as the operation to build the top-secret MGU-270 supercomputer at Moscow State University demonstrated. Another is the global shortage of advanced NVIDIA chips: supply contracts are booked two to three years ahead, according to both a T-invariant source at NVIDIA and another specialist at a global AI giant who asked that the company not be named.
As a result, development of YandexGPT and Alice AI has been suspended indefinitely. Yet demand for them is growing rapidly: according to Yandex B2B Tech figures cited on the Finam website, token consumption in Yandex AI Studio increased 18-fold over six months. Yandex’s service status reports currently list Yandex AI Studio as unavailable.
Why Yandex’s data centers were unprepared for war
“Yandex built its data centers and supercomputers in peacetime, for peacetime. All that development was geared toward normal everyday life. It never even crossed anyone’s mind that drones would come crashing through the roof. You don’t expect earthquakes or other natural disasters in the Ryazan, Kaluga, or Vladimir regions, so nobody thought about spending money on physical protection for the buildings,” said one of T-invariant’s experts in the supercomputing industry.
Public descriptions of Yandex’s infrastructure, particularly an article the company published in 2020, show the thinking behind the design: energy efficiency, backup power, simple and inexpensive cooling, and the ability to redistribute workloads among sites.
A source told BBC News Russian that Yandex regularly practiced taking one data center offline and shifting its workload to others. But the loss of several major sites in succession was probably never rehearsed. The source also said that services may have relied on two separate buildings in Vladimir, each serving as a backup for the other: losing both at once was considered impossible.
“In Russia, they usually build fairly basic ‘boxes’ to house data centers. There are no substantial walls or barriers, nothing like that, almost no liquid cooling, no sophisticated fire-suppression systems, even though advanced technology is available, including Russian technology. That’s all considered outrageously expensive ‘capex’ for Russian businesses. Nobody could afford it. Then there’s the extreme concentration of facilities. Around 70–80% of all data centers are located around Moscow and St. Petersburg,” said a supercomputing expert.
The first public calls in Russia for better data center security came just a couple of days before the first attacks. “One of the main tasks now is figuring out how to move computing capacity and all the IT workloads it handles farther away from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Moscow region… somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, strikes haven’t reached yet,” Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov said at the Digital Solutions forum on October 6. On the evening of October 7, just hours before the first attack, RBC reported that representatives from the IT industry and the Digital Development Ministry were discussing the possibility of locating AI data centers in “friendly countries.”
BBC News Russian reported that Russian forces had already been striking data centers in Ukraine by then. From September 23 to 28, they damaged at least six such facilities. The attacks left people without internet access and disrupted television broadcasts. Russia’s Defense Ministry even posted an image on its social media accounts reading “Digital detox… by force.” As early as October 4, two days before Filatov’s remarks, Volodymyr Zelensky had warned of retaliatory strikes: “Do they really think we won’t respond?”
Other attacks in 2026 also showed that data centers are among the priority targets in wartime. Civilian data centers were hit by drones and missiles during the U.S.–Iran conflict. Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been attacked several times since Washington began its bombing campaign against Iran. The company advised customers to move their data to sites outside the region because it was unclear when the facilities would resume operations. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also threatened to destroy the OpenAI Stargate data center completely.
“In Germany, I studied the Leibniz Supercomputing Center near Munich. It’s a windowless cube surrounded by a moat so you can’t ram it with a car. You enter by crossing a small suspension bridge. The cube itself is essentially a building within a building, a Faraday cage [an example of architectural radio-frequency shielding]. So they really have taken serious measures to protect it, physically and in other ways.
“And this supercomputer ranked below Yandex’s Chervonenkis in the top 500. But the Germans invested heavily in protection. That kind of protection won’t stop ballistic missiles, but it can certainly stop drones. We also know of some incredible underground data centers in Norway and Finland. Another example is Alibaba’s supercomputing center in China. Almost all the leading supercomputer operators in the top 500 spend freely on [capital investment], installing sophisticated liquid- or immersion-cooling systems. Russia’s IT leaders cut costs on all of that,” the expert said.
In Norway, Lefdal Mine houses its server rooms in a former mine, about 700 meters (2,300 feet) inside the mountain from the entrance. The site provides physical protection and uses cold fjord water for cooling. Some of the supporting infrastructure, including generators, remains on the surface.
The Finnish facility The Rock, in the Pori area, uses nine chambers in tunnels originally excavated for military purposes. The underground facility covers about 8,500 square meters (91,500 square feet), is protected by the surrounding rock and is divided into security zones. Its specialized infrastructure includes direct liquid cooling.
Who will end up getting a ‘digital detox by force’?
Of Russia’s six largest supercomputers, only Sber’s two machines are at a site relatively well protected against drone attacks. Christofari and Christofari Neo are in Skolkovo, which has better air-defense coverage. MTS’s GROM supercomputer is in Lytkarino, in the Moscow region. Yandex’s remaining data centers are also in the Moscow region, in Mytishchi and Ivanteyevka. All these towns near Moscow regularly face large-scale Ukrainian drone attacks.
“Getting supercomputers of this caliber back up and running simply isn’t possible now or in the near future. It’s not even a question of having the money. The main problem isn’t even sanctions — it’s the shortage of chips and other components. There’s a huge waiting list for them worldwide. But the costs of gray- and black-market imports are also very high. So things really suck these days,” said a supercomputing specialist who spoke to T-invariant.
The next update to the global top 500 supercomputer ranking will be published in November. Chervonenkis currently ranks 101st, while Kazakhstan’s Alem is 104th. Kazakhstan’s second machine is 122nd, ahead of every other Russian supercomputer. T-invariant’s experts have no doubt that the Ukrainian military’s retaliatory “digital detox by force” will leave Russia behind Kazakhstan as early as this fall when the countries’ leading supercomputers are compared in the top 500 ranking. Competing with the United States, China, or Japan is out of the question: Russia already trails them by two orders of magnitude.
As T-invariant previously reported, the Netherlands is also among the countries ahead of Russia in the top 500. Two machines operated by former Yandex head Arkady Volozh’s company Nebius are listed under the Netherlands: ISEG, which ranked 12th when it was launched, and ISEG2. Together, they have a peak performance of about 425 petaflops. According to the government’s plan for developing the mathematical sciences through 2036, the five Russian machines in the top 500 have a combined peak performance of less than 100 petaflops. That gives Volozh’s company alone more computing power than all the Russian systems on the top 500 list combined.
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Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education has proposed requiring tuition-paying university students to pay for their first semester before enrolling, according to a draft ministry order.
Under the draft, applicants would have to sign an enrollment contract and pay for at least one semester to enroll as tuition-paying students.
The ministry’s press office previously said the initiative was “aimed at addressing the problem of ‘phantom’ competition for places.” Applicants can currently sign contracts with several universities at once, “reserving several places for tuition-paying students during admissions and making them unavailable to other applicants.”
“Advance payment will commit applicants to their choice and make the admissions process for tuition-paying students clearer and fairer for everyone involved,” the ministry said.
The proposed rules would take effect on March 1, 2027.
The ministry has also proposed barring expelled students from reenrolling at the same university for five years. The restriction would apply to students expelled “as a disciplinary penalty.”
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Rescuers are searching for seven sailors missing after a fire aboard a tanker in Romania’s territorial waters in the Black Sea, Reuters reported.
The San Marino-flagged Wine Trader sent a distress signal at about 7 a.m. on October 15. Of the 12 people aboard, four were rescued and seven remain missing.
That same night, another vessel, the Comoros-flagged chemical tanker Yara J, caught fire in the Black Sea. No one was injured, and the crew managed to put out the fire on its own.
Both ships were anchored off Romania’s coast when the fires broke out, Reuters reported. Local authorities, however, have not yet linked the fires to a Russian drone attack.
At least five other cargo ships have come under drone attack off the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria over the past 10 days, according to Reuters. All those attacks took place outside NATO territorial waters and killed 23 sailors.
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Ukraine’s campaign to paralyze airport operations in Russia is “only just getting started,” sources told The Atlantic’s Simon Shuster.
Shuster first reported on plans for the operation, code-named M&M’s, in late August. On September 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s skies were “becoming extremely dangerous” because “there will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account.”
Shuster’s sources now say Ukraine has been trying in recent weeks to disrupt air traffic around Russian airports with long-range drones. But Zelensky has yet to approve the original plan, which called for much more aggressive tactics.
A larger-scale version of the campaign would use AI-guided drones capable of evading Russian air defenses. Mass production of these drones is expected to begin soon, one source told The Atlantic.
The Atlantic reported in August that Mykhailo Fedorov, who was defense minister when the original plan was drawn up, actively pushed for it. Work on the plan was reportedly suspended after his dismissal in July.
Moscow’s airports began suspending operations more frequently in October. During the first 14 days of the month, the four airports were closed for a combined 101 hours, according to calculations by Agentstvo, compared with just 46 hours in all of September. Overnight into October 14, all of Moscow’s airports were closed for a record seven consecutive hours.
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Ukraine has run out of missiles for its U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems, CNN reported, citing a source familiar with the situation.
The source said Ukrainian forces intercepted almost none of the missiles in the latest ballistic missile attack overnight into October 14 “due to lack of the (interceptor) missiles.”
Russian ballistic missiles hit three power plants in Kyiv and energy infrastructure in Kharkiv during the attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been warning for months that a shortage of Patriot missiles undermines the country’s ability to defend itself, especially ahead of an expected increase in attacks on energy infrastructure this winter. In August, Zelensky said he was making “millions” of phone calls to secure supplies and that Ukraine had only a tenth of the interceptor stockpile it needed.
On October 15, Zelensky said Ukraine would resume strikes on Russian oil refineries because Moscow had continued its attacks during the three days Kyiv refrained from attacks at the request of the United States. He suggested he could soften his position in exchange for additional Patriot missiles.
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Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Japanese authorities do not engage in espionage in Russia, responding to the detention of Hokkaido Shimbun correspondent Yuki Imai in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
“Nothing of the sort happened. Right now, protecting Japanese citizens is extremely important, and that is where we intend to focus our efforts,” Takaichi said, as quoted by The Japan Times.
She said Japanese authorities do not yet know exactly what Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) is accusing the journalist of.
“Every country has different laws, so we don’t yet know the details of what they are calling the charges. Nevertheless, Japan will firmly state its position,” the prime minister said.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said the Japanese government had not yet been able to contact Imai but was working to arrange a meeting with him “as soon as possible.”
On October 13, the FSB said it had detained Japanese journalist Yuki Imai in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The agency alleged that, at the direction of Japanese intelligence, he had gathered data on the number of Kuril Islands residents who had been mobilized or had volunteered to fight in the war in Ukraine. After his detention, the Japanese Foreign Ministry summoned Russia’s ambassador to Japan, Nikolai Nozdrev.
Imai had recently published reports on State Duma elections and the unveiling of a monument in Khabarovsk commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Japan. He had also written about strengthening ties between Russia and North Korea. On his most recent trip, he visited Primorsky Krai, with stops in Vladivostok and Nakhodka and a visit to a children’s arts center there. He interviewed Russian-speaking residents of Japan and reported on life in the Russian Far East, the Soviet-Japanese War, and friendship between Russia and Japan.
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The Sverdlovsky District Court in Kostroma fined Andrey Tarasov, a former State Duma candidate for the Yabloko Party, 1,000 rubles for “displaying extremist symbols” under Article 20.3, Part 1, of Russia’s Code of Administrative Offenses.
Tarasov said on his VKontakte page that he was cited for an administrative offense over a photo of him wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “I’m against the party of crooks and thieves” and a drawing of a person kicking a bear.
An expert assessment commissioned for the proceedings says that “Alexey Navalny is considered the creator of the ‘party of crooks and thieves’ meme” and that the slogan was later used “in the context of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s (FBK) activities.” Tarasov published excerpts of the assessment.
By calling United Russia the party of crooks, “the FBK was not simply criticizing it — it was delegitimizing the ruling party in voters’ eyes,” said the expert enlisted by the Interior Ministry. She said the slogan on the T-shirt “identifies the person wearing it as an opposition supporter.”
Tarasov plans to appeal the court’s ruling.
Ahead of the September elections, Sergey Shpotin, secretary of the Communist Party’s Kostroma regional committee, complained on his Telegram channel about Tarasov’s T-shirt with the slogan “I’m against the party of crooks and thieves.” He said: “Rank-and-file Communist Party members get dragged into court, fined, have their doors broken down, and face persecution for telling the truth about the ‘party of crooks and thieves.’ But this ‘new liberal’ gets away with absolutely everything!”
Tarasov previously headed the regional Communist Party branch’s public liaison office and ran several times as its candidate for a single-member district seat in the regional legislature. But in 2026, he had a public falling-out with his Communist Party colleagues. He went on to run for Yabloko in that year’s parliamentary elections, finishing third in his single-member district.
In the summer of 2021, the Moscow City Court declared the FBK an “extremist organization.” Authorities regularly open criminal investigations over donations to the FBK, and defendants in these cases receive lengthy prison sentences.
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Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial monitoring agency, has added journalist and commentator Alexander Nevzorov to its list of “terrorists and extremists.”
Nevzorov left Russia shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. In 2022, Russian authorities designated him a “foreign agent.” In 2023, a Moscow court sentenced him in absentia to eight years in prison on charges of spreading “fake news” about the military.
A Russian court also declared Nevzorov and his wife, Lydia, an “extremist association.” They were added to the terrorist and extremist registry as an association. In spring 2025, authorities opened a criminal investigation into the couple for allegedly financing extremism by collecting donations for themselves.
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Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has dropped its lawsuit seeking to seize the assets of International Chess Federation (FIDE) President Timur Turlov for the Russian state.
Deputy Prosecutor General Igor Tkachev filed a motion to withdraw the lawsuit with Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court, which was hearing the case.
The Prosecutor General’s Office filed the lawsuit in early October against Turlov, a Kazakhstani businessman, and Freedom Finance, the holding company he founded. Sources cited by Kommersant linked the lawsuit to Turlov’s donations to humanitarian projects in Ukraine.
The lawsuit was filed shortly after Turlov was elected president of FIDE. He succeeded former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who had been placed under EU sanctions.
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German authorities have expelled a 21-year-old Russian citizen of Yazidi origin, the local outlet ND reported, citing human rights advocates. He had faced deportation to Russia but was ultimately allowed to leave voluntarily for Armenia.
ND identified the young man as Artur. He had lived with his family in Bielefeld, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, since he was 10. Artur planned to begin vocational training in the summer of 2026 and applied for a residence permit on that basis. Before he could sign a training contract, immigration authorities unexpectedly ordered him to leave for Russia.
On October 8, Artur was detained pending deportation to Russia. But human rights advocates who tried to stop his deportation said he does not speak Russian and would face military conscription there.
Authorities ultimately allowed Artur to leave Germany voluntarily for Armenia on condition that he depart that same day.
Artem Klyga, head of the legal department at the Conscientious Objectors’ Movement, told the outlet Ekho that people at risk of being sent to war by Russia currently have very little chance of obtaining protection in European countries.
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Aftermath of a Russian strike on Kyiv. October 14, 2026
Ukraine is resuming strikes on Russian oil refineries, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced.
Zelensky said Ukraine had held off on striking Russian oil refineries for three days at the request of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Russia, meanwhile, had not honored the so-called energy ceasefire, Zelensky said, continuing to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and killing about 100 civilians over the past week.
“The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” the Ukrainian president said in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday morning, October 15.
The first strike by Ukraine’s military after the pause appears to have hit the Ryazan oil refinery. The plant, owned by Rosneft, is one of the key fuel suppliers for Moscow and the Moscow region.
Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov announced the morning of October 15 that classes had been canceled in 14 schools and 25 kindergartens in Ryazan because of “a mass drone attack on the region.” The Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ published a photo early that morning showing a flare over the Ryazan oil refinery, suggesting it was linked to the drone attack.
Authorities in the Ryazan region confirmed the strikes, saying a fire had broken out at the refinery. Malkov also said that “a warehouse and vehicles on the grounds of another enterprise in Ryazan” had been damaged. He declined to give further details, adding that the damage was being assessed.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine’s military attacked the Ryazan oil refinery with 69 drones and four Flamingo cruise missiles. The Russian military said it had shot down the drones and missiles, but added that “a fire broke out at the refinery as a result of falling drone debris.”
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Wednesday afternoon, October 14, that Ukrainian forces had struck two oil refineries, one in the Saratov region and one in the Ryazan region. “We see that the Ukrainian side is not showing any movement toward an energy ceasefire,” he said. At the time, authorities in the Ryazan region and eyewitnesses had not reported any strike on the refinery there, and Novak’s claim about a strike on an oil refinery in the Saratov region remains unconfirmed.
Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, commenting on Zelensky’s remarks about resuming strikes, referred to Novak’s statement. According to Peskov, there had been no moratorium on Ukraine’s part, and strikes on Russian oil refineries and energy facilities had continued throughout this period. “There is nothing new here,” Peskov said, once again accusing Ukrainian authorities and Zelensky personally of “not wanting to make peace.”
War in photos. Aftermath of a Russian strike on Kyiv.
Russian forces struck Kyiv with drones and missiles overnight on October 14, killing three people and injuring about 20. A nine-story apartment building caught fire in the Desnianskyi District as a result of the strike.
Fire at an apartment building in the Desnianskyi District after a Russian strike. October 14, 2026
Kyiv residents near their home, damaged in the Russian attack. October 14, 2026A worker with Ukraine’s State Emergency Service at the site of one of the Russian strikes on Kyiv. October 12, 2026. Ukrainian President Zelensky said that allies had not shared information about the impending attack.77-year-old Stanislav in his apartment, which burned after a Russian strike on Kyiv. October 14, 2026
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Russia has nearly completed construction of a major new base for launching jet-powered drones near the Ukrainian border in just six weeks, Reuters reported, citing satellite imagery.
The base is being built in the Rostov region. As of August 31, the site was still an empty field, Reuters said. It now holds a sprawling complex spanning an area equal to 126 soccer fields.
Mike Monnik, founder of the private intelligence firm DroneSec, said the images suggest the base is designed to launch the newest jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones. Eight launch pads sit in the western part of the complex.
Monnik estimated the base could support the launch of about 100 jet-powered drones a day and said it will likely become fully operational within “a matter of weeks.”
Russia has started actively using jet-powered drones to strike Ukraine in recent months. Unlike classic drones, they offer a significant increase in range and speed. They are harder to shoot down than ordinary drones, since they are too fast for specialized electric-motor interceptors.
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Russian streaming platforms Kion and Okko are airing Klim Kozinsky’s new series Noon, based on Beetle in the Anthill, a novel by Soviet science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The story belongs to their Noon Universe, a vision of a prosperous future in which humanity has achieved communism and made contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. But this utopian world is far from perfect: intelligence agencies still call the shots on Earth, and people have yet to learn to trust one another. Critic Anton Khitrov reviews the novel’s first screen adaptation.
Strugatsky adaptations are new cinematic fairy tales
The 2010s were a quiet decade for screen adaptations of the Strugatsky brothers’ work. Aleksei German’s long-gestating film Hard to Be a God came out in 2013, and only short films followed. Foreign directors and producers showed little interest in the Soviet science fiction writers. Television director Alan Taylor, known for his work on Game of Thrones and other projects, once set out to adapt Roadside Picnic, but could not sell the idea to producers. Russian film and television studios rarely tackled science fiction either: the genre is expensive and difficult to shoot, and audiences have grown accustomed to the production standards of Hollywood, HBO, and Netflix.
By the mid-2020s, though, the Strugatskys were enjoying a revival. The series Hard to Be a God ends on October 15. Noon, based on the novel Beetle in the Anthill, premiered two weeks earlier. The feature film Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, starring Yevgeny Tsyganov, is set to come out in January. At least one more series is in development: The Wish Machine, based on Roadside Picnic (Alan Taylor is not involved in this project).
The reason for this surge of interest remains unclear. There is no anniversary to mark, and the books have not entered the public domain. The various projects have different producers, and no single hit — like Cheburashka, which touched off a wave of imitators — appeared in theaters or on streaming services to set off a similar trend. Nor did the Strugatskys become noticeably more relevant in the 2020s than they were in the 2010s. The most plausible explanation is that production capacity has finally caught up with the demands of science fiction, and a familiar name in the credits lowers commercial risk.
Noon is a special case, though. Producer Danila Sharapov told Kinopoisk the project took 18 years to go from concept to premiere. If it succeeds, the team hopes to adapt other novels from the Noon Universe series as well.
The series director, Klim Kozinsky, has had an unconventional career. He studied theater directing under avant-garde director Boris Yukhananov at his Studio of Individual Directing and assisted international stars of experimental theater at the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky: Theodoros Terzopoulos and Romeo Castellucci. His film and stage work often engages with philosophical texts. In 2016 he staged Idiotologiya “Idiotology,” which combined Dostoevsky with Gottfried Leibniz, and in 2017 he released the animated film Tetragrammaton, whose characters included thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like other students of Yukhananov — Dmitry Troitsky and Alexander Dulerain — he later moved into mainstream television.
Kozinsky made his first series, Mental, a dramedy about a con artist, together with Dulerain. He went on to release two more television projects: Clinic 13, a supernatural drama set in a hospital, and Pervyi nomer “Issue One,” a workplace drama about the glossy magazine industry based on a script by Sergei Minayev. Noon marks his debut in science fiction.
‘Noon’ reflects its time: in some ways, it’s a series about PTSD
Beetle in the Anthill was published in 1979. It carries noticeably less idealism than the Strugatskys’ earlier works from the era of Khrushchev’s Thaw, since it focuses on intelligence agencies that remain loyal to old methods — secrecy, control, and violence — even in a prosperous future society.
The novel’s narrator, Maxim Kammerer — familiar to readers from another Strugatskys novel, The Inhabited Island — works for COMCON-2, the main Earth intelligence agency of the 22nd century. The head of COMCON-2, the vigilant Rudolf Sikorsky, orders Kammerer to put a man named Lev Abalkin under surveillance. Abalkin had abandoned his post in space, apparently killed a colleague, and secretly returned to Earth, where he now rushes from place to place, tracking down old acquaintances and trying to uncover some kind of secret. Before deserting, Abalkin worked as a Progressor, infiltrating less advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to promote their development. His report on a mission to the planet Hope provides another storyline in the novel.
The best thing about Noon is its trio of lead characters. Like the creators of Hard to Be a God, the people behind Noon could not resist paying homage to Aleksei German, bringing in Leonid Yarmolnik, who played Don Rumata in German’s film. This time, instead of a brief cameo, Yarmolnik got a full-fledged role as the powerful Sikorsky. Yuri Kolokolnikov plays a restrained Kammerer, while Maxim Matveyev plays an expressive Abalkin. Preparing to portray a character who had served in hot spots in space, Matveyev studied material about people with PTSD, and his performance turned out to be unexpectedly topical. All three actors are convincing — which, unfortunately, cannot be said for either the supporting characters or the setting as a whole.
The series’ world lacks both originality and logic
Writing science fiction is, in a sense, undoubtedly easier than filming it. Take architecture: the Strugatskys did not need to specify what buildings looked like on a thriving future Earth or on the post-apocalyptic planet Hope. They exist in the story, but readers are free to imagine them however they like.
Architecture is nothing, though. The Strugatsky brothers introduced entire intelligent races into their plots without describing them in detail. The Tagorans, a fairly significant faction in the Noon Universe series, are a case in point: all readers know about their biology is that they once went through a larval stage in their development, until they fixed their own genes.
A screen adaptation is another matter. Filmmakers have to design everything, from the Museum of Extraterrestrial Cultures, where the key events of Beetle in the Anthill take place, to the Tagorans themselves. In its attempt to build a convincing world on screen, Noon falls short not only of contemporary Hollywood science fiction filmmakers like James Cameron or Denis Villeneuve but even of Georgy Daneliya’s low-budget Kin-dza-dza, in which the production designers built an entire alien civilization — a parodic one, but a complete one — out of scrap metal.
In Kozinsky’s series, the setting feels like an afterthought. The Moscow of the future consists of snow-white high-rises of impractical shapes topped with colossal statues (some locations were shot on site: the COMCON interior, for instance, is the Zilart museum, while the exterior is the Garage museum). The planet struck by catastrophe is a gray, rocky desert. The enemy base is a black, spiked pyramid. The aliens differ from humans mostly in the color and texture of their skin, much like in Star Trek — a classic, though one that first aired half a century ago. The future in Noon is so derivative and so shamelessly computer-generated that it is simply impossible to believe in it.
How a fictional world looks is, without question, a fundamental question for science fiction film. But how that world works matters just as much — and the series has problems there too.
Consider one example. Because Beetle in the Anthill is a novel about intelligence agencies and, more broadly, about access to information, the Strugatskys worked out in meticulous detail how secret operations at COMCON-2 function. The series discards nearly all of the rules the writers invented and offers none in their place.
In the novel, Kammerer searches for Abalkin alone, since Sikorsky does not trust the other agents, and questions witnesses by posing as a journalist. In the series, Kolokolnikov’s character works with an assistant and does not bother with any cover story. That is far from the most glaring breach of secrecy in the show; the most glaring one cannot be described without spoilers.
Breaking COMCON-2‘s own protocols would be one thing, but the creators sometimes dispense with basic human logic altogether. “If Abalkin shows up, let me know,” Kammerer asks a female witness, then leaves the room without giving her a business card or any way to reach him. “For the next lesson, prepare a report on the Wanderers,” a teacher tells the students before sending them home — apparently expecting everyone to turn up with the same report. The manager of the resort where Abalkin is staying sees through a window that Abalkin is armed and calls emergency services, but when he spots a woman entering Abalkin’s room, he hangs up with visible relief. “It’s good that woman showed up. She distracted him,” he later explains to Kammerer.
The characters in the series behave oddly and speak just as strangely. “By the way, what’s happening with my new petition to COMCON’s leadership about returning to Earth?” Abalkin presses his captain. One COMCON agent complains to a colleague: “He’s keeping secrets from you too? He’s in love with you!” Plot-relevant information is never dropped subtly; instead, it is spelled out in the middle of dialogue so the viewer never has to guess at anything. The Strugatskys, by contrast, held to the opposite principle, withholding explanations from the reader until the very end.
The creators of the adaptation got rid of the talking dogs. That was a mistake.
One of the visual effects creators behind The Avengerssaid in an interview that the film’s success depended largely on how believable Hulk turned out to be — the only one of the six lead characters who does not look human.
The same holds for the Beetle in the Anthill adaptation: it can be judged by how it portrays the golovan Shchekn, Lev Abalkin’s friend and partner in the novel.
In the novel’s terminology, golovans are a “cynoid race” — in plain terms, intelligent talking dogs that emerged on the planet Saraksh “as a result of radiation mutations.” As long as they stay silent, they look almost exactly like Earth dogs, apart from a somewhat larger head (hence the name) and less expressive facial movements, which makes it hard for humans to read their thoughts.
There are plenty of ways to portray a talking dog on screen: a puppet, makeup, CGI, or an actual trained dog. The creators of the series rejected all of them. A dog-headed humanoid, makeup artist Irina Leshko explained in an interview, would come across as a character from either a fairy tale or a horror film. So the golovans in the series became a humanoid race, and creating Shchekn required no CGI, just makeup — excellent makeup, it should be said. But something essential was lost along the way.
Golovans don’t simply appear in the novel because it is space science fiction, a genre that more or less requires aliens. For the Strugatskys, they are strange, unpredictable creatures, fundamentally incomprehensible, onto whom humans project their own notions of intelligence and culture. Golovans have no folklore of their own, for instance, but enterprising humans have learned to fake it, since people readily believe that talking dogs must have created their own epic — something like the Kalevala or the Elder Edda.
This is an important motif in the novel: people tend to judge everyone by themselves. Confronted with the mysterious, superior civilization of the Wanderers, Earth’s leaders suspect they are dealing with colonizers — a conclusion shaped by humanity’s own history.
The only character in Beetle in the Anthill capable of friendship with another form of intelligence is Lev Abalkin, the first Earthling to go on a space mission with a golovan partner. It is no accident that, as a child, he dreamed of becoming a zoopsychologist rather than a Progressor — that specialty was forced on him. The Strugatskys’ Abalkin is an outsider, drawn to everything nonhuman because he finds no understanding among people. His caretakers and superiors make clear that the limitations of the human mind show up not only in dealings with aliens but in interactions with fellow humans as well.
In short, Shchekn’s canine appearance is not just a matter of design: the uniquely close relationship between Lev Abalkin and a creature utterly unlike him is, in a sense, the key to the entire novel.
In the series, all of this subtext is lost. Kozinsky’s Shchekn is essentially just a person with an unusual appearance. The director cast Black actor Nikita Tau Naledi in the role, apparently deciding his look was “alien” enough. Judging by the white dreadlocks the golovan wears, the creators of the series seem to see no real difference between African cultures and extraterrestrial ones.
The Shchekn of the screen adaptation is not the haughty, stubborn creature with mysterious motives from the book. He is a loyal friend and an artless truth-teller, not especially civilized but good-natured by nature. Literary scholars call this archetype the “noble savage” (the best-known example being Friday from Robinson Crusoe). The irony is hard to miss: for once, a Black actor plays a major role in a prominent Russian series, yet the team behind the project has nothing to offer him beyond an outdated colonial trope.
The creators were afraid of being accused of an inaccurate adaptation. But inaccuracy isn’t the problem.
What makes Noon unique is the disclaimer that opens every episode — a rare case of a project all but begging the source material’s fan base for mercy. “The series’ plot does not match the original text by the authors,” the creators warn, “but it was developed with respect for the original work of these great Soviet writers.”
Strugatsky fans are, to put it mildly, a demanding audience. But the problem with both new adaptations — Noon and Hard to Be a God alike — is not deviation from the text. Adapting half-century-old science fiction without taking some liberties is impossible; the Strugatskys, for instance, never imagined smartphones, and their 22nd-century videophone is so bulky it has to be “dragged,” not carried, from room to room. The real problem is simplification standing in for interpretation: the setting is simpler, the dialogue is simpler, the meanings are simpler.
The Strugatskys are being flattened into an average, Western-style work of contemporary science fiction. Noon calls Moscow the center of humanity, and the entire Earth, according to the creators’ concept, speaks Russian. No explanation is offered for why, but the premise alone apparently qualifies the project as patriotic science fiction — it is not for nothing that the Internet Development Institute backed both new Strugatsky adaptations. Genuine patriotism, if it really was called for, would have meant trying to create something original and worthy of the source material, rather than turning it into Star Trek.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
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