Semyon Krasotkin, a 27-year-old mathematician and journalist from Moscow, has been jailed on treason charges, the news outlet Vot Tak reported.
Krasotkin was detained at Domodedovo Airport in mid-August 2026 after a trip to Kyrgyzstan, a source told Vot Tak. Border guards searched his phone and found “stars” — paid reactions that serve as Telegram’s virtual currency — that he had left on posts in opposition and Ukrainian Telegram channels.
Krasotkin was then kept in custody through a series of back-to-back jail terms for the administrative offense of “petty hooliganism.” Before that, Vot Tak’s sources said, he had been threatened with treason charges, torture, and violence.
Krasotkin was due to be released on September 17 but was again kept in custody. He was taken to the Moscow office of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic security agency, where authorities opened a treason investigation into him, sources told Vot Tak. On September 19, a court ordered him held in pretrial detention for two months.
One source told Vot Tak that investigators listed “star” reactions worth a total of 2,200 rubles in Krasotkin’s case. Another said Krasotkin had sent “stars” to a Ukrainian Telegram meme channel that was probably raising money for Ukraine’s armed forces.
Krasotkin earned a master’s degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and worked as a mathematician at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences. He also joined Russian Wikinews at 16. The project’s website lists him as one of its nine administrators; he has published more than a million news items.
Criminal investigations over Telegram “stars” have been reported since early 2026, though the initial investigations involved allegations of financing terrorism. In the summer, the Telegram channel Tyuremny Advokat reported the first treason investigations over Telegram “stars.” In September 2026, human rights advocates asked Telegram founder Pavel Durov to make paid reactions to posts anonymous because Russians were facing criminal prosecution over them.
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Russia’s Justice Ministry has added Diana “Naoko” Loginova, the vocalist for the band Stoptime, to its registry of “foreign agents.”
The ministry also added Loginova’s fiancé, Stoptime guitarist Alexander Orlov, to the list.
Another new addition to the registry is the Malinovy Klin Nezavisimaya Kuban (Raspberry Wedge Independent Kuban) movement.
Stoptime is a street band from St. Petersburg that became known for covering songs by musicians designated as “foreign agents.”
In the fall of 2025, the band’s members were detained and subjected to a series of “revolving-door arrests” for allegedly organizing a mass gathering in a public place. In total, the musicians spent more than a month in a detention center. After their release, Loginova and Orlov left Russia. They recorded their first album while living abroad.
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The Turkish criminal gang known as the Daltons may have been involved in the arson attack on a Starlink satellite ground station in the village of Wola Krobowska in Poland’s Masovian province, Der Spiegel reported, citing sources.
The ground station caught fire on September 23. Polish authorities called the fire a deliberate act of sabotage and blamed Russia. According to Spiegel, Russian intelligence services may have hired the Daltons to carry out the attack.
On October 12, two Turkish citizens suspected of involvement in the arson attack were arrested in the German town of Nürtingen at Poland’s request. Spiegel identified the men as 38-year-old Ümit E. and 34-year-old Müslüm T. The outlet said they likely belong to the Daltons — or at least may have acted at the direction of the gang’s supporters.
A court in Stuttgart is expected to decide in the coming days whether to extradite the two men to Poland.
Spiegel reported that Russian intelligence services have so far relied primarily on “low-level agents,” such as petty criminals who took on jobs for small amounts of money, to carry out sabotage in Europe. If it is confirmed that Daltons supporters were involved in the arson attack on the Starlink terminal in Poland, that would signal a shift in Russian intelligence strategy, the outlet said.
The Daltons gang was formed in 2024. According to the Azerbaijani news site Haqqin.az, its members were mostly young people born in 2000 or later. In Turkey, the Daltons were involved in the killing of Serdar Öktem, a prominent lawyer and member of the Nationalist Movement Party, who was shot dead in his car in Istanbul. Gang members also operated in Germany and other European countries, where they engaged in extorting protection money, arms trafficking, and contract killings.
The leader of the Daltons, Beratcan Gökdemir, was arrested in Russia in 2024, Spiegel reported. Turkey demanded his extradition, but Russia never handed him over. Experts speculated that the Kremlin might have hoped to get something from the Daltons in return. It remains unclear whether Gökdemir is still in Russia.
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Donald Trump said he had not ordered restrictions on Starshield, the military version of Starlink, in Ukraine.
“Well, I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me. And I don’t think it was Elon [Musk],” Trump told reporters.
Trump said he had checked that morning and everything was working as usual. He said he was “not even sure” Starlink had stopped working in Ukraine.
On October 14, Ukrainian military personnel reported restrictions affecting their Starlink satellite communications terminals — specifically, the military version, Starshield. The restrictions caused some Ukrainian military missions to fail.
The following day, a senior U.S. administration official told Axios that the White House had nothing to do with the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine. However, sources cited by Reuters said the White House had ordered restrictions on Starshield. They did not specify who had given the order.
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An apartment building in Kyiv after a Russian missile strike. October 13, 2026.
Russia expects to force Ukraine to capitulate this coming winter by disabling its energy system, particularly by leaving Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa without electricity, heat, or water, The New York Times reported. The newspaper reviewed a Russian government plan that Ukraine intercepted and showed to its European allies in September.
According to the plan, Russia would need about 70 ballistic missiles, 720 long-range drones, and 150 guided aerial bombs to cut off water, electricity, and heat to Ukraine’s three largest cities. Russian military planners believe a month of strikes at that intensity would destroy Ukraine’s energy system.
With the war now in its fifth year, previous attacks have left Ukrainian power plants unable to operate at full capacity, and each new strike quickly knocks them offline, the newspaper reported. Before the war, for example, the three combined heat and power plants supplying Kyiv had a total generating capacity of about 1.3 gigawatts. That has now fallen to about 500 megawatts.
If Russia’s plan succeeds, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa could lose 90% of their power generating capacity and see heat supplies cut by 90%, disrupting water and sewage systems, according to the newspaper.
Russia’s confidence that the plan can work stems largely from Ukraine’s shortage of air defenses, particularly Patriot interceptor missiles, without which Ukrainian forces are virtually unable to defend against ballistic missiles.
Analysts agree that Moscow now has a better chance of succeeding in its air campaign than at any other point in the war. Ukraine’s missile defenses have been depleted by cuts in American aid, Russia’s missile and drone arsenal has grown more powerful and effective, and years of strikes have left Ukraine’s energy infrastructure far more vulnerable.
This makes Moscow extremely unlikely to agree to any version of the energy ceasefire Kyiv has repeatedly proposed. “The only card they have to pressure the Ukrainians are these air attacks. They don’t have anything else,” Harry Nedelcu, a director at the consulting firm Rasmussen Global, told The New York Times.
But history shows that such bombing campaigns, which devastate economies and civilian life, usually fail to force an enemy to surrender, the newspaper reported. The United States failed to achieve its aims this way in Vietnam, during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s, and in the current war against Iran.
“Punishing the adversaries’ civilian population and trying to break its will has a very poor historical track record for coercing it to concede defeat,” Seth Jones, a military expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the newspaper.
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An immigration raid is underway in central St. Petersburg, where OMON riot police have cordoned off a block on Moskovsky Prospekt near Sennoy Market. The block includes a prayer room attended by about 1,000 worshipers, a law enforcement source told TASS.
Officers are also checking nearby hostels and cafes. Several dozen people have been detained, journalists said. Officers are checking registration documents, migration cards, and work permits.
Enlistment officers are taking part in the raid, checking whether recently naturalized Russian citizens have registered with the military. “So far, several dozen people have been identified and served summonses to report to a military enlistment office for registration,” the TASS source said.
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Pope Leo XIV spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin and the Vatican said.
During the call, the pope expressed “deep concern” about the dire humanitarian situation in Oleshky, in the Kherson region, and called for a ceasefire to allow deliveries of humanitarian aid and the safe, voluntary evacuation of civilians.
Putin gave the pope “comprehensive explanations of the Kyiv regime’s responsibility” for “the humanitarian situation that has developed in Oleshky,” the Kremlin said. “Support was expressed for the Vatican’s intention to help create conditions that would keep the city’s residents safe and allow essential supplies to be delivered. The two sides agreed to cooperate on this,” the Kremlin press service said in a statement.
The pope is in the hospital after being diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma. He has undergone surgery and is recovering but remains under medical supervision.
Residents of Oleshky (known in Russian as Alyoshki), in the Kherson region, have lived under Russian occupation since 2022, but this fall conditions there have become dire, verging on a humanitarian catastrophe. Constant drone attacks have left residents without food, electricity, or adequate medical care. They cannot safely leave the city and sometimes cannot even bury loved ones who have been killed.
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European leaders did not press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to tone down his remarks about U.S. President Donald Trump during their meeting in Brussels, diplomatic sources told Politico.
“What do you expect him [Zelenskyy] to do? He’s desperate, and the situation is as bad as it can get,” one of the sources told the outlet.
The previous day, the Financial Times reported that EU leaders planned to urge Zelensky to tone down his criticism of Trump, fearing that the Ukrainian president’s increasingly sharp remarks could further damage the already strained relationship between Washington and Kyiv.
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Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court has ordered Oleg Shorin, the former director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Library for Natural Sciences, held in custody on charges of large-scale fraud, Kommersant reported.
The basis for the charges is unknown.
Shorin stepped down as the library’s director in December 2023. In June of that year, Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court fined the library 141,000 rubles for misusing 2.8 million rubles in public funds, according to Kommersant.
The library told Kommersant it did not know why its former director was being prosecuted.
Shorin graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. From 2011 to 2018, he worked at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. He then became director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Library for Natural Sciences, where he worked on digitizing the library. In 2023, he left that position and became director of digital transformation at Rently, where he was responsible for the strategic development of a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to discuss his relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump at a news conference in Brussels.
A Sky News reporter asked Zelensky whether he believes Trump is using him as a scapegoat for his own low approval ratings ahead of the U.S. congressional elections.
Zelensky fell silent for a few seconds, then smiled pointedly. When other reporters in the room started laughing, too, he said, “This is my answer.” He then left the news conference.
Earlier in the news conference, Zelensky said Starlink service in Ukraine has not yet been fully restored and again reported a “significant shortage” of Patriot missiles. He said he had asked the United States for additional interceptors to cover the period during which Ukraine would refrain from striking oil refineries in Russia, but the United States refused.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop striking oil refineries in Russia, claiming the strikes — not the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, caused by the war the United States and Israel started against Iran — are driving up global diesel prices.
Under pressure from Trump, Ukraine agreed not to strike Russian oil refineries on the understanding that Russia should reduce its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. That did not happen, and three days into the pause, Zelensky said Ukraine’s armed forces are resuming their strikes.
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A group of U.S. congressmen has proposed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky halt strikes on Russian oil refineries in exchange for an expanded Starlink coverage zone for Ukraine’s armed forces, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The lawmakers raised the idea at a meeting in Kyiv last Friday. Under the plan, the U.S. would extend the Starlink coverage zone 300 kilometers (186 miles) into Russian territory in exchange for Ukraine halting the strikes, allowing Ukraine’s armed forces to destroy Russian launch systems.
Zelensky signaled he was willing to accept the proposal and halt strikes on Russian oil refineries for 100 days, WSJ reported.
The newspaper did not say whether the congressmen were acting as envoys for U.S. President Donald Trump or were advancing the proposal on their own initiative.
Trump has publicly demanded for several weeks that Ukraine halt strikes on Russian oil refineries. In mid-October, he said Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to an “energy truce,” meaning a mutual halt to attacks on oil refineries.
Ukraine did refrain from striking Russian oil refineries for several days, Kyiv said, but on October 15, Zelensky announced that the strikes would resume because Russia, he said, had continued to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Moscow claimed there had never actually been a moratorium on Kyiv’s part.
Starlink service is currently limited to Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. The Atlantic reported in August that former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov had unofficially tried to persuade SpaceX owner Elon Musk to expand Starlink’s coverage zone for Ukraine’s armed forces so Ukraine could strike Russian missile launch systems. Musk refused, warning of the risks of escalation, according to the magazine.
Ukrainian authorities are looking for ways to strike Russian missile launch systems amid a critical shortage of Patriot missiles, which has left Ukraine effectively defenseless against Russian ballistic attacks. Zelensky, who announced yesterday that strikes on oil refineries would resume, stressed that he is willing to soften his position if allies supply Kyiv with more Patriot missiles.
War in photographs. Kharkiv
On the morning of October 16, Russian drones attacked an outdoor market in Kharkiv. Two vendors — a 71-year-old woman and a 58-year-old man — were killed and 13 other people were injured, authorities said.
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Dozens of court hearings in Russia were disrupted due to “technical malfunctions” after strikes by Ukraine’s armed forces on Yandex data centers, the independent Russian news outlet Verstka reported.
Hearings began to be canceled on October 8, when Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region. PravoTech, the company that services the electronic system for Russia’s arbitration courts, sent out notices about a “mass outage” at the Yandex Cloud data center.
The outage affected arbitration courts in the Sverdlovsk, Smolensk, Tula, Kostroma, Ivanovo, and Yaroslavl regions, as well as Altai Krai and the Volga district. The courts could not hold online hearings, make audio and video recordings, or process documents in the “Moy Arbitr” (“My Arbitrator”) system.
As a result, dozens of hearings had to be postponed or interrupted between October 8 and 14, and some petitions were left unconsidered. By October 16, the problem had not been fully resolved, the outlet said. Case files on the courts’ websites are not opening, and files containing rulings cannot be downloaded.
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Ukrainian drones struck Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra, Governor Ruslan Kukharuk said.
The drones hit an industrial facility in the Surgut district, where a fire broke out, he said.
“Emergency services are working at the scene. Specialists are currently assessing the scale and nature of the damage caused. I am personally overseeing the situation,” the governor said. He did not provide further details, including which enterprise was hit.
Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug lies more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Ukraine.
The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ says the Surgut Gas Condensate Stabilization Plant named after Viktor Chernomyrdin (a Gazprom subsidiary) was hit.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin transferred the Russian business of French flooring maker Tarkett and four other major companies with combined revenue of 53 billion rubles to the management of Marat Mirkhaidarov, a former deputy premier of Zabaikalsky Krai, the independent Russian investigative outlets The Insider and Agentstvo found.
Control over the companies passed to Center Capital Management Company LLC. Two companies registered in Russia carry that name, and one belongs to Mirkhaidarov, The Insider found.
Mirkhaidarov served as deputy chairman of the Zabaikalsky Krai government until March 2025. In January 2024, he volunteered to fight in the war against Ukraine with the Chechen battalion “Akhmat,” spending four months at the front. He resigned afterward, citing the need to recover from a battlefield injury.
Mirkhaidarov personally confirmed receiving the assets in a conversation with Agentstvo. He called the decision “the political will of our president” and said he was ready to return the assets at Putin’s first request.
He asked journalists not to report on the transfer of the companies.
Right now we’re giving our enemies a chance to discuss what was transferred, to whom it was transferred, and why it was transferred. We’re giving our enemies, the psy-ops crowd, a chance to dig around. To dig around in my life story, in my family.
Asked whether the change in management might interest Russian businessmen, Mirkhaidarov replied that the business “still belongs, as it always did,” to its foreign owners.
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People visiting Tbilisi for the first time are sometimes surprised by how often they can smell cannabis in the city. That’s because Georgia has effectively allowed the legal use of marijuana since 2018. In addition, acquiring and possessing the drug, even in large quantities, has often not resulted in prison sentences. The situation changed dramatically in 2025, when Georgian authorities tightened the country’s drug laws for both residents and visitors alike. As a result, in the first nine months of 2026 alone, Georgia’s Prosecutor General’s Office registered more than 200 drug-related crimes committed by Russian citizens, some of whom are already serving time in Georgian prisons. Meduza tells their stories — and explains exactly how Georgia’s laws have changed.
“They have a stadium there, so you can exercise. There are animals — rabbits, cats — and the women take care of them. There’s a store, so you can buy things. The shower is shared, each cell has a toilet, and everyone takes turns cleaning. There’s a library, and she reads a lot. You can take part in concerts. You can work, but it’s not mandatory,” said Kristina (name changed), describing her friend Masha Ova, who is serving a two-year sentence in a women’s prison in Rustavi. Kristina said Masha generally describes her life there as a “strict-regime sanatorium” and doesn’t complain about anything.
In 2022, Masha left for India because of Russia’s war with Ukraine, and in 2023 she moved to Georgia. In Tbilisi, she worked at a tattoo studio and sang in the rock bands MÖRÖCÖLI, PUNKI, and NECROFEST, occasionally performing solo acoustic concerts. In early May 2026, she suddenly disappeared, and a few days later a court-appointed lawyer contacted one of her friends on Instagram and said that Masha had been detained.
Friends later learned that police had searched her apartment. According to Kristina, officers found four grams of marijuana. Masha, her friend said, was what’s known in slang as a “helper.”
“For example, your friends want to smoke. And you know where to get it. You go to buy some for yourself, and naturally they say, ‘grab me some too.’ Masha would agree, but only for friends, and she’d take a cut for it. Basically, she wasn’t even a dealer, just a helper. But she admitted guilt right away,” Kristina explained. According to her lawyer, David Lagadze, Masha maintains that police found four grams of marijuana on her, not 9.5 grams as was later written in the case file. But Masha decided not to contest this, so as not to worsen her situation.
David Lagadze told Meduza that, along with the marijuana, police seized scales with traces of narcotic substances from Masha’s home, and that “in such cases, Georgian courts already find a person guilty of aiding distribution, regardless of the amount of drugs seized from them.” The Article on “aiding distribution” was added to Georgia’s Criminal Code in 2025 as part of a sweeping tightening of drug policy initiated by the ruling Georgian Dream party.
How Georgian authorities changed the country’s drug laws
“Nothing could be more anti-national and anti-Georgian than the extremely serious effects caused by liberal drug policy,” Mamuka Mdinaradze, then the leader of the parliamentary majority from the Georgian Dream party, said in 2025, announcing amendments to the country’s anti-drug legislation. Authorities justified toughening penalties for marijuana-related crimes by citing the spread of “hybrid cannabis strains,” which they said “have a more harmful effect on the human body.”
The changes took place in two stages. In April 2025, they primarily affected Article 45 of the Administrative Offenses Code, which regulates the acquisition, possession, and use of small quantities of drugs (the article applies to all drugs except marijuana and several substances for which there is no “small quantity” threshold). Under this article, penalties were tightened, liability was introduced for refusing to take a drug test, and the list of penalties involving deprivation of rights was expanded.
Lawmakers removed Article 273(1), which had regulated actions involving cannabis or marijuana plants in large and especially large quantities, from the Criminal Code in July of that year. Possession and other marijuana-related criminal offenses now fall under Article 260, which carries harsher penalties.
A small quantity is up to 5 grams for dried marijuana, up to 10 grams for raw.
A large quantity is 5 to 70 grams dried, or 10 to 140 grams raw. Beyond that is an especially large quantity.
Small quantities are regulated by the Administrative Offenses Code. The rest fall under the Criminal Code.
For example, under Article 273(1), illegal acquisition, possession, or transportation of a large quantity was punishable by a fine, community service, or up to two years in prison. Under the new version of Article 260, the same offense now carries five to eight years in prison. Authorities also split Article 260 into four separate articles, which created the new Article 260(4) on aiding distribution.
The Georgian human rights organization the Social Justice Center says one of the main changes is the restoration of the possibility of sentencing people to prison for acquiring, possessing, and growing marijuana for personal use in large amounts.
The amendments effectively allowed authorities to circumvent rulings by the Constitutional Court, which had eased penalties for marijuana-related offenses over the past decade.
The Constitutional Court’s first major ruling on drug-related cases came in 2015, in the case of Beka Tsikarishvili. Police found 69 grams of marijuana on him for personal use. Under the law in effect at the time, he faced seven to 14 years in prison. Tsikarishvili challenged the sentencing provision in the Constitutional Court as violating the constitutional ban on cruel and degrading punishment (his lawyer managed to prove that a disproportionate punishment does not serve the goal of restoring justice but instead turns a person into a tool for intimidating society to prevent future crimes).
The court ruled in Tsikarishvili’s favor, and it became impossible to send someone to prison for possessing up to 70 grams of marijuana for personal use. Tsikarishvili himself was ultimately sentenced to a fine of 2,000 lari (just under 50,000 rubles). After the Tsikarishvili case, the Constitutional Court issued a whole series of similar rulings on penalties for growing marijuana for personal use, using marijuana, and acquiring and possessing small amounts of other drugs.
“When the Constitutional Court issues a ruling, it must be taken into account in subsequent proceedings, and laws must change in accordance with that ruling. Instead, they [Georgian authorities] used legal maneuvering to circumvent these rulings and ended up detaining drug users again,” lawyer Lasha Tkesheladze told Meduza.
Formally, the Constitutional Court’s rulings remain in force. But they were incorporated into specific legal articles, and it was exactly those articles that the 2025 reform removed from the Criminal Code or rewrote.
At a rally in support of marijuana legalization. Tbilisi, 2013
One Constitutional Court ruling untouched by the new amendments effectively legalized the use of marijuana. In 2018, in a case initiated by leaders of the opposition Girchi party, the court ruled that fines for marijuana use, when it does not pose a threat to others, violate the constitutionally guaranteed right to the free development of personality. That ruling was incorporated into the law, and marijuana use stopped being considered an offense. But possession, acquisition, transfer, production, and sale remained administrative or criminal offenses, and the amendments passed in 2025 deepened this paradox.
The legal changes have already led to a doubling in the number of arrests. Prisons are almost out of space.
In 2024, the Interior Ministry registered 5,598 drug-related crimes under the Criminal Code; in 2025, that figure was almost twice as high, at 10,475; and in the first half of 2026, it was 7,533. More than half of these crimes involve possession and acquisition (Article 260). However, the Interior Ministry attributes the rapid rise in registered drug crimes to more active efforts to detect them.
Georgia’s Prosecutor General’s Office told Meduza that criminal prosecutions under drug statutes against Russian citizens in Georgia also increased in 2025 and 2026. The office opened 119 such cases in 2024, 196 in 2025, and 234 in the first nine months of 2026 alone.
Among drug crimes committed by Russians in Georgia, as in the country as a whole, “possession and acquisition” ranks first. In 2026, the agency opened more than half of all prosecutions (124 of 234) under this article.
Among foreign nationals facing criminal prosecution under drug statutes, Russians rank second, behind Turkish citizens (274 cases in 2026), while Ukrainian citizens rank third, with 196 cases.
As the crackdown on drug crimes intensified, prison overcrowding also began to rise. According to data from Giorgi Burjanadze, Georgia’s former deputy public defender, the number of inmates in Georgian prisons grew by 43% over the past year and a half. Georgian prisons held 12,344 people in June of this year, a record in nearly 14 years of Georgian Dream rule. Burjanadze calculated that only 12 free spaces remained in Georgian prisons in June.
The number of Russian citizens imprisoned in Georgia also grew by 50% in just over a year. Georgia’s Penitentiary Service said Georgian correctional facilities held 214 Russian citizens at the end of August 2026. In June 2025, before the reforms, that number was 141.
How many Russians are serving sentences for drug-related crimes is unknown. In response to a request from Meduza, the Penitentiary Service said it does not keep statistics on defendants or convicts broken down by article of the Criminal Code. But many Russian émigrés in Georgia have learned from personal experience that police have stepped up their fight against drugs.
From a vegetarian café to prison. Police have started stopping Russians on the street much more often.
In late July, Polina Riske, who lives in Georgia and helps Russian drug users, posted a reel titled “A Message to Weed-Smoking Émigrés in Tbilisi.” In the video, she says she learns about another arrest on drug charges every two weeks. Riske also urges people who use marijuana or are involved in distributing it to stop, because raising money for lawyers and fines has become too difficult. Within a few weeks, the video had drawn more than 150,000 views.
Russian émigrés regularlywrite on social media about increasingly frequent street checks in Tbilisi. Sergei, a programmer from St. Petersburg, rents an apartment in Saburtalo, a district popular with Russians. He told Meduza that police have stopped and searched him on the street four times over the past year while he was walking his dog: “A car pulls up somewhere in the courtyard, sometimes just black, sometimes with ‘police’ written on it, and several men get out and ask you to show what’s in your pockets. They also take photos, look at the recent photos on your phone, and write down your address,” Sergei said.
He attributes the police attention to the graffiti near his home, which advertises drug drops and “drug shops” in Russian: “It makes sense to pay attention to people who look Slavic. And I really have seen people picking up drug drops several times while walking my dog.”
“The last time was the scariest,” Sergei said, “because at some point they started saying that an investigator was about to arrive and we’d all go to my place together for a search. We know how that can end from the case of Zinovkina and Gribul. But in the end they looked at my phone and changed their minds.”
Discussing these checks, Russians in Georgia speculate about what exactly might arouse police suspicion: a fanny pack, a dog, walking in a deserted area, or an appearance that police consider unconventional, such as piercings, tattoos, or colored hair.
A check on another Russian émigré ended with a search of his home. “On Russia Day, June 12, he was supposed to come to a meeting, but he didn’t show up,” said Anton about his friend Pasha (names changed). “Usually, if something’s going on with him, he lets us know; he doesn’t just disappear. So we immediately suspected something was wrong.”
Anton met Pasha back in Russia. Both were into music, and “Pasha played in bands himself and helped organize events.” After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Pasha moved to Georgia. At first he worked at vegetarian cafes founded by fellow émigrés. But, as Anton said, “the situation there is pretty sad.” At some point Pasha started looking for work on the local market and became a food delivery courier. His earnings improved, and over time he even saved enough for a motorcycle.
However, amendments to Georgia’s Law on Labor Migration that took effect at the start of 2026 required foreigners to obtain work permits and capped the number of permits available in different sectors. For foreign couriers, the quota was zero.
Pasha went back to working in food service and tried to save up money to leave for Europe. When he failed to show up to a meeting without warning, his friends immediately went to his home and discovered that it had been searched. “He was planning to leave in July, but he was arrested in June,” Anton said.
Anton doesn’t want to go into detail about the circumstances of the detention. “They seized about 60 grams of weed, a few thousand lari, electrical tape, and scales from his home. According to his lawyer, that’s considered sufficient evidence that a person is involved in distribution,” he explained.
Anton doesn’t believe that scales and electrical tape found in someone’s home can be evidence of distribution, and he doesn’t understand why investigators didn’t look for witnesses or buyers, or seize Pasha’s phone or computer to identify the people he allegedly sold drugs to and prove the distribution charge.
Pasha was charged under the same article as Masha: aiding distribution, which carries a sentence of five to 10 years in prison.
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Authorities often offer Russians a deal, and for money they can reduce a sentence. But not everyone manages to raise the money.
Pasha’s lawyer, Zaza Kachibaia, told Meduza that cases of foreigners, including Russians, being detained on drug charges have become more frequent over the past year and a half: “In our practice, among the lawyers we work with at our firm, roughly seven out of 10 cases involve citizens of a foreign country.” At the same time, Kachibaia said he hasn’t noticed discrimination against migrants.
Anna (name changed) runs support groups for people dependent on cannabis in Tbilisi. Anna said police attention toward drug users increased starting in the fall of 2025, a couple of months after the new amendments took effect, while émigrés from Russia “had relaxed after several years of living in Georgia and didn’t have time to adjust.” Masha, for example, according to her friend, simply “wasn’t following local news,” didn’t track changes in the law, and wasn’t too worried, because “it’s just marijuana in Georgia.”
Anna said police sometimes detain people during a random street check: “A guy with a suspicious appearance, a hipster, roughly speaking, walks by, and he’s stopped. And he has a few grams on him for personal use. In that situation, everything depends on the weight.” Sometimes detainees say they bought marijuana “for friends,” and the outcome can depend not only on the weight but also on the packaging: “If it’s several one-gram bags, they can already pin a distribution charge on you,” Anna said.
Sometimes police come straight to someone’s home for a search, acting on a tip. That’s apparently what happened with Masha. Police staked out her building and searched her apartment, even though she had nothing on her at the time. According to her friend Kristina, Masha also believes a tip explains why police “tacked on” an extra 5.5 grams during the search. “If the apartment turns out to be empty, at least plant that,” Kristina said, explaining the police’s possible logic.
News about the detention of users or small-scale dealers from the émigré community sometimes appears in chats: acquaintances write that a person has stopped responding, and then he’s found in prison. Sometimes, while someone is still being searched for, news of the case reaches the media.
“If you realize that an acquaintance of yours, say, went to get ‘stuff’ and hasn’t been in touch for several hours, given the current climate, he might have been detained. So we find a lawyer right away,” said Anna, who has helped arrested acquaintances more than once.
Anna said that when someone faces charges under a criminal statute, investigators often offer the option of admitting guilt and entering a cooperation agreement. In some cases, this lets detainees pay a fine and go free: “I know guys who’ve already been released, and of course they’re all in a hurry to leave the country.”
In other cases, a procedural agreement makes it possible to reduce the sentence set out by a given article. Anna sent Meduza a “price list” circulating in chats that explains “how much it costs” to reduce a sentence through a cooperation agreement with investigators. Pay 50,000 lari (approximately 1,350,000 rubles), and you go to prison for eight years (instead of, say, the maximum of 20). Pay 100,000 lari (2,700,000 rubles), and you get four years. Pay 200,000–250,000 lari (5–7 million rubles), and you get deported from the country. The “price list” doesn’t specify which articles or specific crimes these fines apply to.
According to lawyer Zaza Kachibaia, there’s no single “price list” for fines. The prosecutor’s office determines the amount case by case, based on the article, the circumstances of the crime, and the defendant’s resources: “If it’s just possession, the fine might be five to ten thousand lari, but for distribution it could be ten times more,” the lawyer said.
Kachibaia urged against generalizing that everyone enters into procedural agreements. He advised taking a deal only when there’s enough evidence and no real chance of winning the case in court.
In the lawyer’s view, sentencing practices in émigré cases tend to be more lenient, because deportation can be applied as a punishment in Georgia: “It’s a completely logical and rational approach. Why sit in Georgian prisons for 10–20 years when you can impose some sentence or fine and deport the person to a third country with a ban on entering Georgia for a certain period of time?” Kachibaia said.
The prosecutor’s office also offered Pasha a procedural agreement: a fine of 200,000 lari (6.4 million rubles) and deportation, or three years in prison. His friends, like the friends of other detainees in similar cases, launched a fundraiser immediately after his detention. But they raised only about 15,000 lari (485,000 rubles), enough to pay for a lawyer and support their friend in prison. On September 24, Pasha was sentenced to three years in prison.
Masha also entered into a procedural agreement. Prosecutors offered her a fine-and-deportation option, but her loved ones couldn’t raise the 200,000 lari, so she was sentenced to two years in prison, to be followed by deportation from Georgia and a 20-year entry ban. According to her friend, having seen what other convicted women went through, Masha considers this a very good outcome and feels lucky: both the cost of legal representation and the sentences of some of her cellmates are many times higher.
After sentencing, she was moved to a cell with more lenient conditions: she can move around the prison grounds, attend classes, and work. Kristina said Masha is holding up well and tries to think of this experience as a creative project. She reads a lot, draws illustrations inspired by the books she’s reading, and her loved ones post letters and drawings on Instagram whenever she manages to get them out.
“Whatever happens, I accept everything happening to me fully, and with gratitude for the chance to be human. Different, alive, capable of change. Only now do I feel my true strength. Yes, in a cramped cell with heavy bars on the window, in uninterrupted, clear consciousness,” Masha wrote from prison.
How effective is Georgia’s new drug policy
In 2023, Alternative Georgia, a Georgian nongovernmental organization that studies addiction, published a study on Russian drug users living in Georgia. David Otiashvili, an addiction specialist and the director of Alternative Georgia, explained to Meduza that their study can’t be used to draw conclusions about how widespread psychoactive substance use is among migrants in general, but that it does reveal certain patterns.
Tbilisi
According to the study’s findings, the stress of forced migration increases the risk of psychoactive substance use. “What was common to everyone was that the initial shock, depression, and confusion mostly contributed to erratic use of depressants. But all of that passed after a few months,” Otiashvili said.
Use of stimulants among study participants, by contrast, declined somewhat in the initial stages. Otiashvili attributes this decline to people’s tendency to stick with substances they’re already used to, even though not all of them were available in Georgia. Context also matters for stimulants, he said: “It’s about mood, pastime, having fun, and migrant status doesn’t really contribute to that.”
In Otiashvili’s view, migrant drug users are distinguished by their isolation: as a rule, they don’t interact with locals. “If drug use happens in groups, it’s a Russian-speaking group,” he said, adding that they also almost never use local harm-reduction and prevention services.
“When problems arise, they try to solve them within their own migrant circle or through online consultations with Russian-speaking specialists. If people prone to risky behavior have no contact with services that could reduce potential risks, that’s not a good thing,” Otiashvili said.
In conversation with Meduza, Otiashvili said there currently isn’t enough systematic, up-to-date information, not just about migrants, but about drug use in Georgia overall. “Mechanisms and platforms for cooperation between the academic community, nongovernmental organizations, and government bodies haven’t worked for the past two years, starting from spring 2024,” the expert said.
Zurab Sikharulidze, an addiction specialist and member of the opposition Federalists party, also told Meduza that there’s little information about the “Russian segment” of drug users, but he considers it a major problem for Georgia. According to Sikharulidze’s assessment, there are many users among migrants overall, and NPS and chemsex are widespread. At the same time, except in severe cases, émigrés don’t seek addiction treatment or medical help, and no separate diagnostic or prevention programs exist for them, such as for HIV or hepatitis C.
Many addiction specialists fear that migrants will affect the HIV situation in the country, Otiashvili said. According to him, these concerns stem from the gap between a high prevalence of injection drug use in Georgia and a low rate of HIV, both nationwide and among injection drug users (unlike, for example, in Russia).
At the same time, migrants, in Sikharulidze’s view, are already affecting the local drug market. “After the war began and Russian and Ukrainian populations relocated, cocaine became very popular,” the expert said. On the darknet in Georgia, “the largest marketplaces are Russian and Kazakh.” Otiashvili agrees that migration affects the popularity of certain substances, but cites other examples: crystal methadone and certain synthetic stimulants.
Both experts agree that the reforms Georgian Dream has carried out solve neither the problems linked to drugs and migration nor the broader problems of drug use or drug trafficking. In Sikharulidze’s view, current drug policy, especially when it comes to addiction treatment, increasingly resembles Russia’s repressive model, and the changes in drug policy fit a broader trend: “Georgia has established an autocratic regime that copies laws from the [Russian] State Duma,” the expert argued.
Otiashvili said that, in reforming drug policy, Georgian authorities are, first, engaging in populism: “They try to show society that they care about public health, that they’re taking measures to protect the next generation, reduce crime, and so on.” Second, in his view, decisions on drug policy often disregard expert opinion or scientific data and are instead based on the personal convictions of the people making them. Third, Otiashvili said, “these laws are needed to maintain control over a large mass of people,” and he added that they also serve as a tool of blackmail, control, or political pressure.
Georgian Dream appears to be pleased with the results of the drug policy reform. In May 2026, at a meeting of the European Coalition to Combat Drugs, Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze described how Georgia stepped up anti-drug-trafficking measures in 2025: arresting a record number of drug traffickers, increasing crime detection rates, and seizing an unprecedented amount of drugs. Georgia’s Interior Ministry also reports on anti-drug successes almost daily, with press releases typically featuring news about the interception of large shipments.
Experts don’t trust the authorities’ reports of success in fighting drug trafficking. “Every day they show on TV how they catch huge drug shipments, but there’s no shortage on the black market, and prices haven’t gone up,” Sikharulidze said. In his view, the Interior Ministry is boosting its numbers by detaining ordinary users. “Any use can end in a hefty fine, the loss of certain rights, a suspended sentence, or prison,” the addiction specialist warned.
In her counseling sessions and conversations with acquaintances, Anna actively encourages people to quit using drugs. “It’s better to quit now while you’re free than to be forced to quit in prison,” she said. “Take our friend, who they’re trying to pin a twenty-year sentence on. Do you think she’s smoking now? No, she’s not smoking. She quit, because there’s no way to do that there. You can do it while you’re free; you have a unique chance.”
After Pasha’s case and similar stories, many of Anton’s acquaintances really did quit, he said: “Those who used any drugs have stopped, or they do it in other countries when they travel, because it’s become too dangerous. In that sense, the law really does work.”
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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More than 30 people have gone on hunger strike at the El Valle immigration detention facility in Texas, the mother of one of the protesters told Vot Tak.
She said 15 women began the hunger strike October 11, and 20 men, including Russians, joined them later. The protesters say they face poor detention conditions and a lack of medical care, and are demanding that their rights be upheld.
The husband of one of the hunger strikers told journalists that, contrary to the rules, prison administrators are not monitoring the health of those refusing food: “The administration tells them straight out that there’s only one way out of this detention — deportation. They say, if you want, go ahead and sit there, starve. If you croak, we’ll take you away and bury you.”
El Valle Detention Facility has become the third immigration detention center where detainees have declared a hunger strike. In early October, asylum seekers at the D. Ray James immigration detention facility in Georgia filed a collective complaint about detention conditions and announced plans to begin a hunger strike. According to Vot Tak, detainees at the Winn immigration detention facility in Louisiana have also started a hunger strike.
Russians held at D. Ray James complained about poor food, communication problems, and being unable to see a doctor even with acute pain. Facility administrators threatened the detainees with deportation and with sending them “to your cozy Gulag.” They were seeking a transfer to another facility.
According to Georgia Public Broadcasting’s estimate, about 500 people are taking part in the hunger strike at D. Ray James. On October 11, Agentstvo, an independent Russian investigative outlet, reported that one of the organizers of the hunger strike in Georgia, Russian citizen Idris Makhmudov, was deported from the US. About 40 protest participants ended up in solitary confinement, sources told Agentstvo.
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 drones struck Rivne, a city in western Ukraine, overnight on October 16.
The strikes hit civilian infrastructure, including residential buildings, said Oleksandr Koval, head of the Rivne region administration.
Seven people sought medical attention after the strikes.
Drones continued attacking Rivne the morning of October 16.
Ukrainian media reported that drones hit the “Ekvator” shopping center and the “Demaks” home improvement hypermarket. Footage posted online shows the buildings destroyed.
Russian drones last attacked Rivne on October 13, when a strike hit an academic building at Rivne State University of the Humanities and injured 30 people.
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.
President Vladimir Putin has placed the Russian assets of several European companies, including French flooring manufacturer Tarkett, under temporary management, naming Tsentr Kapital as the managing company.
Tarkett is one of the world’s largest flooring manufacturers, with two plants in Russia, in the Moscow and Samara regions.
Putin also placed under temporary management shares and stakes in the charter capital of Kappa Rus, Mensen Packaging CIS, and Eviosis Packaging Kuban, which produce containers and packaging, as well as Ontex Ru, a manufacturer of personal hygiene products.
In September, Putin placed the Russian assets of retailers Globus, Metro Cash & Carry, Auchan, and Leroy Merlin under temporary management. He also introduced temporary management at Nestlé Russia.
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.
Russia’s new State Duma is facing its first internal power struggle, a standoff between LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky and United Russia’s Pyotr Tolstoy. Meduza learned of the standoff from a source close to the Duma administration’s leadership and from an LDPR member. A political strategist who works with the Presidential Administration’s political bloc and with Russia’s systemic parties confirmed the account.
The dispute arose because Slutsky wanted to keep his post as head of the international affairs committee, but at the Kremlin’s initiative, lawmakers named Tolstoy the Duma’s top “international affairs” official.
A source close to the Duma administration’s leadership told Meduza that Slutsky has refused to vacate the office in the Troekurov Chambers reserved for the committee chairman. His reception office will also remain in the same building.
The chambers, a 17th-century architectural landmark, sit in the Duma’s inner courtyard on Georgievsky Lane. The building was constructed as the estate of the boyars, the princes Troekurov, and later housed a rental apartment building and a hotel. During the Soviet era, the chambers held the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture. Renovation began on the building in the 1980s but halted due to the collapse of the USSR, leaving the chambers in disrepair.
Throughout that period, the building remained on the books of the Presidential Property Management Department. In the 2010s, authorities transferred the architectural landmark to the Duma, and it was finally restored in 2019. The new restoration phase envisioned housing the international affairs and CIS affairs committees in the chambers from the outset. The chambers were specifically outfitted with rooms for receiving international delegations visiting the Duma.
By refusing to vacate the Troekurov Chambers, Slutsky wants to “complicate life” for the committee’s new chairman, United Russia’s Pyotr Tolstoy, according to Meduza’s sources.
As compensation, Tolstoy received offices in the Duma’s main building that previously belonged to LDPR’s deputy speakers. Those posts were once held by Igor Lebedev, the son of party founder Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Boris Chernyshov, deputy speaker of the previous session.
A former LDPR member told Meduza that the office and surrounding rooms were “luxurious,” citing the quality of the renovation. He said LDPR faction meetings used to be held there.
However, a source in the administration said the offices have a “serious drawback” for Tolstoy:
They’re located in the Duma’s main building. That means that to take part in committee events, Tolstoy would have to move to another building or push to get the committee space closer to himself. But that’s practically impossible.
Slutsky’s attachment to the office in the Troekurov Chambers has another reason: Vladimir Resin, the former deputy mayor of Moscow for construction and the Duma’s oldest lawmaker, headed the working group during the 2019 restoration.
Meduza previously reported that rumors have long circulated in the Duma that Slutsky is Resin’s illegitimate son and calls him “dad.” When the authors of that article asked Slutsky in 2019 whether he was really Resin’s son, he said that Resin was “like a father” to him.
The Troekurov boyars’ chambers after restoration. Moscow, February 9, 2021. The facade of the State Duma facing the inner courtyard is visible in the background.
A source close to the Duma administration’s leadership said Pyotr Tolstoy is unhappy with Slutsky’s conduct, “especially since until recently they had an almost friendly relationship.” The Russian investigative outlet Proekt has reported that Slutsky, Tolstoy, and members of their families often fly together on business jets.
But Tolstoy cannot simply “kick out” the LDPR leader from the chambers either. “Vacating the office was part of the unwritten etiquette, but there was essentially no precedent for a situation like this,” the same source said.
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Slutsky headed the international affairs committee for two parliamentary sessions, or 10 years. “Lenya positions himself specifically as an international lobbyist. The post of committee chair allowed him to travel [around the world], meet with high-status people, carry out various missions, and maintain ties with security officials and the intelligence services. The party is a nice bonus. And now that pillar [in the form of the committee] has been pulled out from under him, even though he tried to the very end to hold onto it,” a political strategist who works with the Presidential Administration’s political bloc told Meduza.
Proekt previously reported that during meetings with French parliamentarians in Paris, Slutsky asked colleagues not to mention that he’s an LDPR deputy: “They really don’t need to know that I’m specifically from LDPR. I always introduce myself simply as a Duma deputy,” one delegation member recounted Slutsky’s words to journalists. He explained that he “ended up in LDPR simply because he needed a seat in the Duma,” the outlet said.
During the 2026 election campaign, Slutsky clashed with the Presidential Administration’s political bloc, Meduza previously reported. The leader of the Liberal Democrats tried to position LDPR as “the party of the security bloc.” The political strategist describes the loss of the leadership post on the international affairs committee as a natural “consequence of his combativeness.”
He and a source close to the Duma leadership said the LDPR leader is trying to retain control over the committee’s staff while Dmitry Pchelyakov, who worked under Slutsky, remains acting head of it.
“Under the rules, the chairman [of the committee] determines the head of the committee’s staff and its employees, but that requires coordination. Slutsky has lobbying resources that can slow this process down,” a source close to the parliament’s leadership explained. Slutsky himself also remained on the committee as an ordinary member.
As part of Duma etiquette, the LDPR leader congratulated Pyotr Tolstoy on his appointment. However, most of the message focused on Slutsky’s own accomplishments and reflections on his work as committee chairman:
Ten years as head of the international affairs committee have been invaluable experience for me. There’s also a substantial portfolio of ratifications, hundreds of meetings with foreign politicians (sometimes involving quite difficult discussions), the development of new formats for the Duma’s international cooperation, and the fight for national interests at interparliamentary venues, where the voices of Russian deputies and senators could not be silenced by illegal sanctions or Russophobic discrimination.
Slutsky’s congratulatory message also included, for some reason, a video clip from a meeting between Vladimir Putin and the leaders of the parties that won seats in parliament, in which Slutsky himself promises the president to “continue engaging in parliamentary diplomacy.”
According to a source close to the Duma leadership, such a “mocking congratulatory message would not have been published on the committee’s website if Slutsky did not have influence over its staff.”
He called the outcome of the conflict unpredictable, since both lawmakers have their own lobbying connections and resources. For now, “the whole Duma is watching the standoff with popcorn,” he said.
Leonid Slutsky and Pyotr Tolstoy had not responded to Meduza’s questions at the time this article was published.
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.
Russia’s Digital Development Ministry has proposed using artificial intelligence to analyze VPN services’ characteristics, aiming to detect and block them more effectively.
The proposal appears in one draft version of a national plan for implementing AI technologies through 2030, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.
The plan’s drafters said AI could achieve 95% effectiveness in blocking VPN services.
The Digital Development Ministry told Kommersant that “the current version of the draft national plan for implementing AI technologies contains no such information.”
A source who spoke to the outlet, familiar with discussions around the initiative, said algorithms for intelligent traffic analysis are already in use, though these do not constitute AI.
“AI tools make it possible to find VPN servers relatively quickly based on indirect signs: how a node behaves, what hosting it uses, what neighboring addresses look like. And most importantly, this makes it possible to respond more quickly to changes in network activity,” a source in the industry told Kommersant.
However, several sources told the outlet that the use of AI, “especially during the initial stages of training,” would likely result in the erroneous blocking of “legitimate traffic.”
Demand for VPNs has surged in Russia amid blocks on popular social networks, services, and messaging apps. Russian authorities have responded by stepping up efforts to combat circumvention of these blocks. Russia’s budget for the next three years earmarked a record 60 billion rubles for traffic filtering. Reports have repeatedly said the Digital Development Ministry wants to charge higher rates for international traffic (operators treat VPN traffic as international).
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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