Hostilities between Russia and Ukraine are escalating to a new level.

Ukraine’s production of various types of drones is reaching capacity, while the capabilities of the unmanned aircraft are growing rapidly, meaning they can be used to target Russian positions not only on the frontline but also well behind.

These inexpensive but effective weapons allow the Ukrainian army to carry out three interrelated tasks at once.

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First, drones can be used on the frontline to repel Russian attacks.

The Ukrainian army is also beginning to use the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) more actively at greater depths, 100 miles from the frontline and beyond, hitting military targets and disrupting communications.

Finally, long-range drones can be used hundreds or even thousands of miles beyond the Ukrainian border, inflicting not only material damage on Russian territory but also psychological damage on its citizens.

The results are visible: Ukrainian attacks on factories and oil depots have become more common across Western Russia, while the Russian army’s advance in Ukraine has stalled across the front.

Moscow’s military and political leadership has so far shown no willingness to change course. The Russian army is still trying to retain the initiative and launch offensives across different sectors of the front.

But can it continue military operations in Ukraine using its current methods?

An expanding kill zone

As of the end of May 2026, frontlines in Ukraine are largely static, though Russian forces continue local offensives in several areas. These include Kostiantynivka, Lyman and Pokrovsk – all in the Donetsk region – as well as in the Huliaipole area of Zaporizhzhia region.

The pace of the Russian army’s advance, even where it is making gains, has fallen sharply compared with last year, despite continued heavy losses.

In spite of this trend, the Russian military command continues to report successes.

“The 20th Army, having completed the liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic, is advancing westwards on a broad front in the Kharkiv region,” Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, said on 16 May.

The general claimed that Russian troops had captured the key settlement of Borova on the banks of the Oskil River and occupied 85% of the town of Lyman, north-west of Sloviansk.

In recent weeks, however, neither independent researchers nor Russian military sources outside direct Kremlin control have recorded any significant changes along the front line. Online observers, including pro-war Russian bloggers, have mocked Gerasimov’s claims.

In reality, Borova – like Kupiansk, which Gerasimov had previously declared “liberated” – remains fully under Ukrainian control, while in Lyman Russian troops have managed to establish positions only on the outskirts of the city.

There have been minor advances by both sides in isolated sectors, but overall the trend has not favoured Russia. Maps suggest that for the third consecutive month it has lost more territory than it has captured.

The Russian command is now, in general, trying to preserve the backbone of the army – professional soldiers and conscripts who survived the bloody battles of 2022–2024.

To replenish assault infantry units, where the likelihood of being killed on a first combat mission is extremely high, commanders mainly deploy poorly trained civilians lured by large signing bonuses, prisoners, and others.

By contrast, service personnel with combat experience and valuable military specialisms are generally assigned to safer positions further from the so-called kill zone.

The problem for the Russian army is that, with the arrival of large numbers of new drones capable of striking deep behind enemy lines, the kill zone is rapidly expanding. The amount of video footage recorded by Ukrainian drones that shows strikes on Russian military targets and equipment is well up on recent years.

Even the strategically important Donetsk–Mariupol road and the so-called land corridor to Crimea have become highly dangerous, despite until recently being considered deep rear areas.

While Ukrainian drone operators once focused on large, high-value targets such as radar systems or launchers, eyewitnesses report that they are now striking even small and isolated targets.

Pro-war Russian Telegram channels have noted the increasing role of Ukrainian drone operators.

“By summer, attacks by new Ukrainian drones on logistics transport are expected to intensify. All major roads within a 150km radius of the line of combat contact will fall within the strike zone,” wrote the Telegram channel Molot Vedm.

What kind of drones do the Ukrainian Armed Forces have?

Of the new medium-range drones adopted by the Ukrainian army and capable of striking targets 60 miles (100km) or more away, Russian military analysts identify four types as particularly dangerous.

These are the Hornet, manufactured by the American company Swift Beat; the HX-2 Karma produced by the German company Helsing; the RAM-2X manufactured by the European UMO Group and its Ukrainian subsidiary; and the B-2 70/125, a Ukrainian-made drone produced by Atma Sky, with an extended range of up to 400km.

All can reach high speeds while making little noise. They are resistant to jamming and are able to identify and automatically lock on to targets. They can be operated either in first-person view mode or via AI-assisted autopilot systems.

The Russian army, meanwhile, fields medium-range strike drones such as the Lancet, Scalpel, Molniya, Klin and Kub. Some have strong technical specifications, but Russian industry is unable to produce them in the same quantities as Ukraine and its allies.

Ukraine also holds an advantage in its drone support systems.

In addition to Starlink, it has deployed an extensive mobile communications network along the front line. Ukraine also uses secure radio channels and relay drones, to enable operators to control drones and analyse information while remaining deep in the rear.

The Russian military analyst known online as the “Philologist in Ambush” said that “the quantitative increase in the supply of [Ukraine] strike drones to frontline units is being accompanied by qualitative changes”.

The analyst added: “The enemy is developing capabilities in autonomous navigation, automatic target acquisition and operation in adverse weather conditions, for example in fog.”

Meanwhile, the Russian Telegram channel Molot Vedm warned: “Over the next six months to a year, there will be a major crisis in defending against strike UAVs in the immediate rear area (100km); almost all [air surveillance posts] will be destroyed by Hornets, which is already happening on a massive scale.”

“We have no viable alternatives for shooting down strike UAVs, and it is unclear when we will. If no measures are taken by 2026, our logistical rear areas could be completely paralysed,” the channel said.

Despondency and optimism

The increasingly gloomy mood among many Russian bloggers who until recently advocated continuing the war in Ukraine suggests Moscow’s current approach to the conflict may need to change.

“The state stubbornly demonstrates its inability to learn, even against a backdrop of monstrous, criminal inefficiency,” pro-war blogger Dulce Lumen wrote in a private Telegram chat.

He added: “As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst period of the special military operation. Even in the autumn of 2022 things were not this bad…[now] the Russian Federation cannot afford a new mobilisation on the scale required to achieve a decisive breakthrough at the front. It has people, but no weapons, equipment or ammunition.”

Other pro-war Russian observers believe the situation can still be corrected. In their view, countermeasures against Ukrainian and Western technological developments must urgently be deployed on a large scale.

But judging by the behaviour of Russia’s military and political leadership, it does not share these concerns and sees no need for radical change. The Russian army continues its mass bombardment of Ukraine, soldiers continue assaulting towns, villages and forested areas, and generals continue drawing up new plans.

According to the Ukrainian high command, Moscow has prepared five scenarios for expanding hostilities in the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction.

“The frontline will expand,” Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s army, told the Ukrainian outlet Militarny. “High command highlighted the threat from Belarus. An operation in the north is possible; we are aware of this intelligence, and the Russian General Staff is currently actively planning offensive operations from the north.”

Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Theo Merz.

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“When I was growing up, I believed and felt proud that I came from a line of anti-fascists,” 57-year-old Berlin resident Rosa tells BBC News Russian. We have changed her name at her request.

But she eventually learned the truth: that fascism was ingrained throughout early 20th Century German society under Nazi rule.

It has taken her on a journey to uncover her ancestors’ involvement in Adolf Hitler’s regime.

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That journey has neared completion with the release of millions of documents about former Nazi Party members being made available in Germany by the newspaper Die Zeit. While Rosa says it has given her closure, a new database has reignited debate over how the country remembers its brutal past.

She was brought up north of Berlin in East Germany. The country, formed in 1949, was formally named the German Democratic Republic - a part of Moscow-dominated eastern Europe.

False narrative

When Rosa was growing up in the 1970s, all aspects of East German life were under tight state grip.

​​”We were told that East Germans were largely descendants of anti-fascists, while the ‘bad guys’ came from the West,” Rosa recalls.

​​Children at Rosa’s school grew up reading books about Soviet liberator soldiers.

She herself saw the USSR as a friend - a “big brother.” As a result, some family stories about WW2 confused her.

For years, Rosa failed to understand why her grandmother “had to run from the [USSR’s] Red Army.”

‘Deep-diving’ into family history’

When Rosa was 16, a Jewish delegation from the United States visited her school for a discussion titled “Children of survivors meet children of perpetrators”.

Only towards the end did she realise she belonged to the second group, not the first.

“Suddenly, it all made sense: [I realised that] Germans were considered the enemy.”

She remembers that moment as “the break of a floodgate” — a sudden shift in understanding.

“That was the time I began deep-diving into my family history.”

Rosa would look into archives, and asked her parents and older relatives to recount their past.

Over the years, she has discovered her grandmother’s brother joined the military at 18, becoming a bomber pilot and being shot down over Greece before turning 21.

Her grandmother’s father was an official who supported the Nazis, although his exact position remains unknown.

And there was another great-grandfather, Otto, who has been on Rosa’s radar for decades.

“He was a policeman in the Polish city of Bialystok, near the border with Belarus.”

The city was home to many horrific episodes of the Holocaust, including hundreds of people being burnt alive inside a synagogue.

With the release of the Nazi Party members’ database, Rosa started searching for Otto right away.

Millions of searches

“I immediately found his membership card. He joined the party back in 1933 - the year the Nazis came to power.

“Was I surprised? No, not by that point. It was simply the final confirmation. I wanted it, and I got it,” Rosa says. “It was like putting an end to a long story.”

Rosa’s searches are among millions the database has seen since its release in February.

Until recently, checking a relative’s Nazi membership meant filing a request with the German Federal Archives.

But the digitised database, first published by the US National Archives and then turned into a searchable tool by Die Zeit this year, has made the search much quicker.

Judith Busch, a spokesperson for Die Zeit, tells BBC News Russian that the tool has been accessed millions of times and generated thousands of comments and messages.

Nazi Party membership

Hitler’s Nazi party was formally called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). It had more than 10 million members before the WW2 allies defeated it in 1945.

The membership archive, kept in Munich, was nearly destroyed at the end of the war: 50 tonnes of documents were sent to a paper mill, but the factory director disobeyed orders and handed them to US forces.

Nazi membership has been a controversial topic in Germany since the Nazi regime fell.

Everyone who has spoken to BBC News Russian about their searches has asked to remain anonymous, rather than risk criticism or shame when others learn of family links to the Nazis. We have changed their names to protect their identities.

“I think it’s connected to people feeling loyal to their family members, even if those people are not alive anymore”, says Johannes Spohr, a German historian specialising in family history.

“For a long time, this topic has been a very strict taboo,” he tells BBC News Russian.

“Everyone I know who checked found relatives in those files,” someone we call Hertha says.

She found two great-grandfathers — a policeman and a teacher — in the database, but believes they committed no crimes.

“Being in the Nazi Party wasn’t uncommon in those days, and some people even had to be part of it simply because of their jobs.”

‘Never join any political parties’

Martin, as we call him, has found the name of his great-grandfather.

“For me, it was quite shocking. My father has said my great-grandfather used to say, ‘Never join any political parties. I once joined one, but later realised it was the wrong party.’”

Historians in general agree that nobody joined the party “automatically” — membership required a personal application and approval.

“Not every party member was personally involved in crimes,” Die Zeit’s head of history, Christian Staas, emphasises.

“But everyone who chose to join the NSDAP thereby supported the Nazi regime, which was responsible for the war, the Holocaust, and many other crimes against humanity.”

However, a membership card alone cannot show how active someone was or whether they committed crimes — that requires further research.

Rosa still has no detail of what Great-grandfather Otto did in Bialystok.

Tens of thousands of Jewish detainees passed through the city, where records of mass executions and other atrocities were found after the war.

Having confirmed her suspicion of Otto being a Nazi member, Rosa says she feels “a sense of responsibility to make sure it does not happen again.”

Privacy fears

While some are flocking to the database, others are critical of the disclosure.

Some argue that publishing such data violates privacy.

Others believe that revisiting the mistakes and traumas of the past prevents Germany from moving forward.

“It is true that some Germans are tired of these discussions”, says Rosa.

“Some of them say we should ‘draw a line’ now”. She says doing so would be like erasing history.

“We cannot stop teaching this to children” she says, with what she feels are growing echoes of the same sort of rhetoric in Germany today.

Johannes Spohr voices doubts that studying family history helps prevent past mistakes being repeated. But he says engaging with the past can foster maturity and a sense of responsibility.

“It’s important to emancipate ourselves from all the myths and even lies that we grew up with — the ones that also shape German society — in order to understand who we are and what our ancestors did.”

Edited by Andrew Webb, BBC World Service.

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For more than 80 years, no-one knew what happened to a Soviet prisoner of war who escaped from the Nazis on the Channel Islands and spent the rest of World War Two hiding from the German occupiers with a local family.

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Known only by his first name, Bokejon, or simply Tom, he was one of about 2,000 Soviet prisoners and forced labourers brought to the island of Jersey to build Nazi fortifications.

After liberation, Tom and the other surviving PoWs were sent back to the USSR and although he promised to keep in touch, once he had returned nothing was heard from him again.

That was until BBC teams tracked down his descendants in Central Asia, far away from Jersey in the far east of Uzbekistan.

It was in 1943 that Tom escaped one of the Nazis’ forced labour camps on Jersey. Exhausted, starving and desperate, he knocked on the door of local farmers John and Phyllis Le Breton. They knew the risk, but they took him in and saved his life.

Conditions in the camps were harsh.

“We were digging stone from the quarry, from six in the morning to six at night, our food consisting of soup at midday and a very meagre portion of bread and some butter at tea-time. We had no breakfast,” Tom later wrote in his diary.

“For the slightest thing, we were brutally beaten… and if we could not work, we were starved and beaten again; they would never believe we were sick.”

For more than two years he was hidden by the Le Bretons.

The danger was real. Another Jersey resident, Louisa Gould, was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and murdered in a gas chamber for sheltering a Soviet escapee named Fyodor Burriy. Her neighbours had reported her to German authorities.

John and Phyllis Le Breton trusted their escaped soldier so much that they allowed him to read to their children and play with them, including their daughter Dulcie.

“Our dear Uncle Tom, we loved him so much. He is my main memory of the war, and his photo is still by my bedside,” said Dulcie, who turns 90 in June.

“But I am still mystified what happened to him after the war.”

After the Channel Islands were liberated in May 1945, Tom, like other surviving Soviet PoWs, was sent back to the USSR. Three letters arrived in Jersey as he was taken home across Europe, but then there was silence.

Ex-prisoners of war who returned to the Soviet Union were typically subjected to screening and interrogation in so-called NKVD filtration camps. Soviet authorities often saw the fact of their capture as a sign of possible disloyalty or collaboration with the enemy.

Some were eventually allowed to return to ordinary life. But many were branded unreliable, faced barriers to work and advancement, and lived under a lasting cloud of suspicion.

Some were sentenced and sent to labour camps inside the USSR. Even after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, the stigma attached to former PoWs did not disappear overnight.

Tom had signed his letters to the Le Bretons as “Bokijon Akram”, but neither they nor Jersey historians knew his full name or exactly where he came from.

Then a team from BBC Russian joined the search.

Even though we have worked for years on Soviet and wartime archives, this case presented a particular challenge.

Tom had signed his name in English, and it was not clear how it would have been rendered in Russian, the language used in official documents across the USSR at the time.

We checked dozens of records and hundreds of spelling variations, gradually narrowing the search using details he had recorded in his diary.

From those entries, it appeared he was about 30 when he was mobilised in 1941, had fought and been captured on the territory of present-day Ukraine, and may have had Central Asian origins.

The search was then narrowed to one likely match: Bokejon Akramov, born in 1910 and mobilised from Namangan, in what is now Uzbekistan.

We found an entry showing that he had been awarded the Order of the Patriotic War decades later. Crucially, that record included a home address.

At this point a team from BBC Uzbek joined the search and travelled to Namangan to check the address, hoping someone there might remember Bokejon or recognise him from the photographs preserved by the Le Breton family.

“How come you have my grandfather’s pictures? Where did you get them from?” asked a man who opened the door to the BBC.

His name was Shamsiddin Ahunbayev and he was Bokejon Akramov’s grandson.

As he listened to the story behind the wartime photographs, Ahunbayev was moved to tears.

According to the family, Bokejon had rarely spoken of his experiences in World War Two.

But one thing had always puzzled them. Despite clearly being intelligent and capable, he was repeatedly refused skilled or sensitive jobs. For many years, he had worked as a gardener at a factory in Namangan.

It now seems possible that his wartime captivity cast a shadow over his working life too.

Bokejon Akramov died in 1996, after what his family said was a long and happy life. His daughter has also since died.

The BBC helped organise a video call between his family in Uzbekistan and Dulcie Le Breton, who still lives on Jersey.

“Dear Dulcie, we thank your family for your courage and kindness,” Shamsiddin Ahunbayev told her. “Our grandfather survived the war and gave us life only because of you. We are so happy that we found you. We invite you to Uzbekistan and will always be waiting for you in our home.”

“My parents did what they did simply because it was the right thing to do,” Dulcie Le Breton replied. “And they were far from the only people in Jersey who helped Soviet soldiers. There were dozens of such stories, and I would very much like people to know and remember them all.”

After learning of the story, the authorities in Uzbekistan decided to posthumously award John and Phyllis Le Breton the Order of Friendship - one of the highest state awards - for their “courage and compassion”.

The Order of Friendship will be awarded to Dulcie Le Breton on Wednesday.

This story was also published on BBC News Online.

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Russian fighters have pulled out of northern Mali after a wave of separatist attacks, in one of the most significant defeats since they arrived in the country five years ago.

The attacks, coordinated by Tuareg and jihadist separatist forces at the end of April, pushed the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps out of the town of Kidal. Paramilitaries’ capture of Kidal in 2023, in collaboration with the Malian army, was one of Russia’s major successes in the West African nation and helped prop up Assimi Goita’s military junta.

Now both Goita’s future and Moscow’s continued role in Mali look uncertain, sources and analysts told BBC News Russian.

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Jihadist and Tuareg separatist forces carried out attacks across Mali beginning on April 25, in one of the largest offensives against the Goita-led junta that has held power since 2021.

Russian paramilitaries have been active in the country since that year, when French forces were driven out following a coup. Moscow’s military presence was originally coordinated by the Wagner Group, but has since been brought under the direct control of the Kremlin.

Separatists targeted the capital Bamako, as well as several other cities and towns, in the first time they have openly cooperated to fight their common enemy, at the end of last month. Malian Defence Minister Sadio Camara was killed in combat north of the capital on April 26.

While Russia’s Africa Corps launched air strikes and used attack helicopters against rebel troops near Bamako, the paramilitary confirmed it had pulled out of the northern town of Kidal, a key military stronghold.

Analysts said the withdrawal suggested intelligence failures on the Russian side and could prompt questions about the benefit of continued cooperation with the Kremlin.

‘Leaving Kidal forever’

General Oumar Diarra, the junta’s chief of staff, confirmed on state television on April 26 that the Malian army had left Kidal and that its forces were regrouping in Anefis, about 62 miles to the south.

A day later, Russia’s Africa Corps also confirmed the retreat. Its Telegram channel reported that Russian troops had left Kidal along with the Malian army “in accordance with a joint decision by the republic’s leadership.”

Russian and Malian personnel appear to have come under heavy attack in the lead-up to the withdrawal, BBC Verify found, with footage posted by militants from the al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) showing a large group of soldiers fleeing from a truck ahead of a drone strike.

Before the withdrawal announcement was made, verified videos located to the base by BBC Verify showed military vehicles evacuating.

The Africa Corps claimed to have removed “heavy equipment” from the base ahead of its withdrawal, but clips shared by rebel troops in the aftermath showed that armoured personnel carriers, patrol vehicles and jeeps were left behind in the hasty retreat.

A source in the country told the BBC that Russian mercenaries did not engage in direct combat with the separatists. Rebels “let those who did not resist” escape, the source added.

Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadan, a spokesman for the Tuareg Front for the Liberation of Azawad (FLA), told the BBC that the junta’s army and the Russians who supported it were “leaving Kidal forever” and that “Kidal is now free.”

“An agreement was reached between Azawad forces and Russian elements of the Africa Corps to ensure their safe withdrawal from the fighting,” he said.

An FLA field commander involved in the Kidal attack told the BBC the group had been preparing for the offensive “for months”. Adding that fighters were now looking to capture further locations, such as the cities of Gao and Timbuktu.

While Russian military personnel were negotiating their exit from Kidal with their Malian allies, a handful of paramilitary fighters were escorting a local DJ to Venice, where he was set to perform at the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, sources told the BBC.

Russian casualties

Flore Berger, a senior analyst at the West Africa Observatory at the Global Initiative on Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), said that, according to unconfirmed reports, Russian mercenaries were also pulling out of areas around Kidal.

“It’s not only Kidal; it is a broader withdrawal from the north,” she said.

“I think JNIM and the FLA reached out to the Russians after the offensive, saying: ‘We don’t want you to be part of this conflict. You should stay out of it. Should you wish to stay out of it, we will escort your people safely out’ - an offer that the Russians obviously took,” Berger told the BBC.

According to her, during the retreat Africa Corps fighters were allowed to retrieve the bodies of several of their dead.

She added that relations between the Africa Corps and the Malian army had long been strained. “It was never one of trust and respect,” she said.

Russian social media channels reported the loss of at least one military helicopter and the deaths of its crew. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Borisenko confirmed that Russia had suffered casualties, without saying how many.

The episode underlined the limits of Russian military and intelligence capabilities in the region, said Christopher Faulkner, a professor at the US Naval War College.

He said the decision to withdraw from Kidal appeared to be driven by self-preservation.

“Whether it is a recalibration and strategic pause to figure out next steps in protecting the regime is anyone’s guess. I think this puts the relationship [between Moscow and Bamako] in great strain,” he told the BBC.

Faulkner described the withdrawal as a blow to Russia’s image.

While it would be unfair to draw wider conclusions about Moscow’s role in Africa in the light of the attacks, Faulkner said it was clear that the Africa Corps had struggled to establish itself as an effective partner in counterterrorism operations in Mali.

Raphael Parens, a research fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), agreed. The scale and scope of the operation by Tuareg and JNIM forces “suggests a complete breakdown of intel gathering…beyond what we had seen already” on the part of the Malian armed forces or the Africa Corps, he said.

He added that the Russians likely withdrew from Kidal both because they faced overwhelming force and because, since coming under the control of the Russian defence ministry, they have sought to limit losses.

Sanctioned leaders

Until the autumn of 2023, Russian interests in Africa were largely represented by the Wagner Group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Wagner forces first appeared in Mali in 2021.

That was after Colonel Assimi Goita ousted President Ibrahim Keita, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to announce the end of Operation Barkhane, which had deployed around 5,000 troops to combat Islamist and separatist groups.

Goita subsequently invited Wagner mercenaries to replace the departing French forces.

Following Prigozhin’s death in 2023, Russia’s Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov toured African nations, seeking to reassure partners that the newly created “Africa Corps” would be no less effective than Wagner.

The Corps is now overseen by Major General Andrei Averyanov, who was sanctioned by the UK in 2024 for his role leading the group.

Averyanov previously led the military intelligence unit responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, along with a number of other operations aimed at destabilising Europe, Western officials say. Czech police also linked him to explosions at ammunition depots in 2014.

Most of Russia’s African partners have accepted the transition to the new paramilitary structure with its direct ties. Wagner, in its previous form, has retained a significant presence only in the Central African Republic.

‘A real risk’

Goita, whose political future had already been uncertain amid a fuel crisis linked to jihadist activity, now faces an even more precarious situation, Faulkner of the US Naval War College said.

“I don’t know if this means insiders within the regime will plot to overthrow him, but this is clearly a legitimate risk at this moment. Troops cannot be feeling good about their prospects,” he said.

Berger, of the West Africa Observatory at GI-TOC, said the junta had suffered a severe blow in terms of top-level personnel. She noted the death of Defence Minister Camara and added that intelligence chief General Modibo Koné had sustained serious injuries. Both were close allies of Goita and had taken part in the 2021 coup.

But Parens, of the FPRI, said Goita could use the current crisis and the loss of a key figure to reposition himself and maintain his own role.

“The Russians retreating without their Malian comrades, along with the death of Sadio Camara - the main pro-Russian officer in the junta - could push the Russians out of the country,” he said. “However, I’m not sure how likely it is that Goita will lose power.”

If anything, Parens said, Goita had been more sceptical of Russian operations than Camara. “Now [Goita] likely has an excuse to boot them out in favor of the Turks or even perhaps the Americans while consolidating his own power base,” he added.

Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Theo Merz.

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Families of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine are being ‘reunited’ with their loved ones by buying AI-generated videos. Some say the clips give them the opportunity for a farewell they were never allowed in life. For the creators who have noticed a growing demand for military-themed content, it’s also a way to make a tidy profit.

“The Special Military Operation is over. The Special Military Operation has been successfully completed. Our heroes are returning,” proclaim billboards across Moscow, using the Kremlin-approved term for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A woman pushing a pram stands stunned on a slush-covered pavement. She turns and sees a man in military uniform holding a bouquet of roses. She throws her arms around his neck, tears of joy streaming down her face.

This 15-second video was posted on Instagram by popular blogger Katya Jin (real name Ekaterina Kirpichnikova). She is the wife of a Russian soldier in Ukraine. He is the figure who we see returning in the video, which was generated entirely using artificial intelligence.

The blogger regularly posts similar AI videos to her 10 million TikTok followers and 50,000 Instagram followers, along with instructions on how to create them. Recently, however, the reels have become less frequent: the 21-year-old’s husband has gone missing at the front.

AI-generated photos and videos featuring Russian soldiers have been flooding social media since the middle of last year. The majority of them are posted by the wives of men participating in the invasion, some of whom pay the equivalent of more than $100 for the videos to be produced, the BBC News Russian found.

Anna Korableva, from Kamensk-Uralsky, a town east of Yekaterinburg, began making such videos in May 2025. Together with her sister, she launched the “Video Farewell” project. Its aim, as stated on the Facebook-like social media network VKontakte (VK), is to help people cope with an “unfinished farewell” and embrace their husbands, parents and children again.

Some of her customers use such videos to inform friends and followers about their husbands’ disappearance or death.

A typical AI video depicting the death of an “Special Military Operation soldier” follows a familiar pattern: a man in uniform embraces his wife and children, then turns and walks up a staircase leading into a blue sky, often surrounded by angels.

Korableva told the BBC that most requests come from families of those currently fighting in Ukraine (according to the BBC News Russian and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, more than 200,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war). Along with photographs, clients send her their stories. One woman shared footage filmed by her husband on the front line, showing soldiers collecting the remains of their comrades.

“In the first months of working on these videos, I cried almost every day. Over time, I learned to separate my emotions from the work. I try to focus on the technical side, to make sure the video turns out beautiful, and worthy of someone’s memory,” Korableva said.

Prices start at 1,300 rubles (around $17 at the current conversion rate) and rise to 10,000 rubles ($133) for urgent orders.

For 2,990 rubles ($40), clients can receive a pre-generated video of the deceased delivering a final message to their family. For an increased sense of realism, voice messages are required.

Production costs are far lower: according to BBC estimates, generating a single video can cost up to 30 rubles ($0.40), though multiple such clips may be needed to produce a complete package for sale.

Korableva’s project is the largest and best known, but far from the only one.

Hundreds of social media groups and accounts offer similar services. The main differences are price and quality: in some videos, the AI generates figures without limbs, or produces faces that are grotesquely distorted.

Demand, however, remains high. Beneath posts, users write comments such as, “I urgently need a video like this,” or “How can I make one? My relative died.”

“Either I’ve become very good at my job, or I’ve started meeting generous people. They often pay double and leave tips. My video farewells seem to evoke very strong emotions,” wrote Aliyana, another creator, on her private Telegram channel.

Despite this, when she posted a sample on Instagram, commenters accused her of “trying to profit from someone else’s misfortune”.

Aliyana insisted she was motivated not by profit but by a desire to help.

She began making farewell videos after her brother was killed in the war, initially offering them for free. “I never thought I’d make money from farewell videos…the subject is too close to my heart,” she wrote in one post.

But at the end of February this year, Aliyana said “the topic really took off” and that AI videos had earned her enough for a two-week holiday, Ray-Ban camera sunglasses and “other things I want.”

She said her daily earnings reached around 55,000 rubles ($733) and that she now has so many clients that two managers handle her messages, while she has begun passing on orders to students she has trained.

Grief as a political tool

“Reanimating” people using artificial intelligence is not unique to Russia.

The digital resurrection of soldiers is part of a global “digital afterlife” industry, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, a researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC.

AI-generated images of deceased individuals - so-called “death avatars” - now appear in various contexts, Nowaczyk-Basinska says.

Museums employ them in interactive installations that allow visitors to “communicate” with Holocaust survivors. They are used in courtrooms, where AI-generated images of victims appear in legal proceedings. They even appear in politics. Recently, a digitally “resurrected” politician took part in an election campaign in India.

Given this, according to Nowaczyk-Basinska, it is not surprising that such technologies are popular among families of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. She notes, however, that she has not yet seen such widespread use of AI-generated content in connection with other conflicts.

She adds that it is still unclear whether AI visualisations help people cope with grief or intensify it. “We still know very little about the long-term psychological and social impact of these technologies on the grieving process,” Nowaczyk-Basinska said. “So it’s a gamble at the moment … we are in the middle of a techno-cultural experiment using these technologies.”

Reactions to these “farewell” videos are indeed sharply divided.

Some viewers say in online comments that they were moved to tears, while others go so far to describe the content as blasphemous, drawing comparisons to the TV series “Black Mirror,” which explores the human impact of new technology. In one episode of the series, a woman buys an AI-created replica of her deceased husband.

Some who commissioned AI content featuring deceased partners told the BBC the videos did little to ease their grief.

“How could it help?” said one woman who bought an AI-generated image of her husband for his tombstone. Despite this, she also had two further AI-generated images of him in her bedroom.

Another woman said: “Could technology help me accept that I will never hug my son again? No. It’s an illusion.”

For others, though, the videos offer a sense of connection. “Thank you, AI, for this opportunity to be with my loved one. Soon it will be two years since you’ve been gone,” wrote one Russian woman beneath a farewell video of her husband.

Nowaczyk-Basinska said it was difficult to make an ethical assessment of such content, which plays both a public and private role.

“If such technologies are developed and distributed to support political goals - for example, propaganda - this becomes deeply problematic,” she said.

“And I would go even further to say that it’s wrong, as it represents a form of politicised grief where emotional responses to loss are manipulated for a kind of strategic purpose or purposes.”

‘Easy money’

Another popular genre of AI-generated videos shows Russian soldiers that are still living and active at the frontline.

The BBC found dozens of accounts apparently run by military wives, producing and promoting AI-generated content based on men on active duty.

Among them is a 20-year-old called Veronika who declined to give her last name or share how much she was making from producing such images.

She said she started working in the field last October, when she made a photo of a soldier sitting in a dugout looking at a picture of his girlfriend. At the time, images like these were already a viral trend.

“Girls started asking me to make them. Men asked me to give them to their girlfriends as a gift,” said Veronika, who moved to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with her mobilised husband.

“Families involved with this [war] don’t have the opportunity to attend photo sessions, so we’re coping with the situation this way. Plus, there are photos that simply convey our feelings and experiences,” she added.

Veronika says she has ideas for content unrelated to war, but military wives are among her “most solvent” clients. When asked why military wives such as her produce such videos, she answered bluntly: “Easy money.”

But whether the AI clips show active or deceased soldiers, participants in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are almost always depicted as heroes defending their families and country. Ukrainian reactions, recorded in the comments under some viral posts, are sharply negative.

“Write the truth. They’re destroying other people’s cities for pennies … Shame.”

“Imagine how we wait for your ‘heroes’ to leave our land. Life cannot be brought back. They took it.”

“You should be ashamed to present your ‘heroes’ who went to earn blood money by killing our children.”

Some Russian bloggers claim in their posts to have earned up to a million rubles from AI-generated content. Whether such figures are accurate is unclear, but the potential for income from this controversial activity is obvious.

Even so, many creators do not see it as a long-term opportunity.

According to blogger Ulyana Lebed, interest in AI-driven military content is likely to fade. “The Special Military Operation will end, husbands will return home, and all this will disappear. Perhaps some requests will keep coming, but [in general] the topic will no longer be relevant.”

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Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Theo Merz.

С конца марта Украина наносит массированные удары по крупным военным и промышленным объектам в глубине российской территории. Самым заметным было поражение нефтяного терминала в Усть-Луге недалеко от Санкт-Петербурга — по нему было нанесено по меньшей мере пять ударов и возникший в их результате пожар продолжался несколько дней. Какие объекты становятся целями украинских дронов? Действительно ли их налеты стали существенно более массированными, чем раньше? И почему с ними больше не справляются российские силы противовоздушной обороны? На эти и другие вопросы отвечает военный обозреватель Русской службы Би-би-си Илья Абишев (российские власти внесли его в реестр «иноагентов», Би-би-си категорически не согласна с этим и оспаривает это решение в суде).

Since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has supercharged its censorship of contemporary art. Security forces inspect exhibitions and give instructions on works to be removed, while authorities blacklist artists if they are so much as connected to opposition figures.

Officers have even beaten art teachers they believe are spreading politicised messages.

As Russia prepares a controversial return to the Venice Biennale, the BBC explores how this censorship operates and how artists, curators and gallery owners are working under these new conditions.

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When a new art gallery opened in central Moscow at the end of last year, visitors were surprised that management prevented them from taking photographs of the exhibits.

While other arts spaces the world over welcome the sharing of images from exhibitions as a form of free promotion, the ZILART Museum of Contemporary Art appeared concerned that this could provoke the ire of increasingly hardline authorities.

Gallery management told journalists covering the opening of an exhibit by the celebrated Grisha Bruskin that the artist himself had forbidden filming of his “DIES ILLA” (the Latin for “That day”), an installation about power and ideology.

But Bruskin had made no such request, said Igor Grebelnikov, an art critic who had arrived at the event with the artist.

“I wasn’t allowed to film, even with a phone. I tried, but they strictly forbade it,” Grebelnikov told the BBC.

Three other sources in the Moscow art market told the BBC that ZILART were stopping visitors from taking images to avoid political backlash.

“There are [objects] there in the form of drones, a female suicide bomber, and criticism of the regime. Such things can’t be shared on social media, and no one wants to anger the authorities,” one source said.

The source, like several others quoted in this story, asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.

A representative of the privately owned ZILART gallery pushed back against multiple claims that it was preventing photos being shared for political reasons. Bruskin’s exhibition was an installation-performance where the viewer becomes part of the action, they said. “Therefore, as in a theatre, we ask viewers to refrain from photography and video recording in order to focus on interacting with the work.”

Bruskin himself did not respond to a request for comment.

A major figure in Russian contemporary art, Bruskin has lived for many years between the United States and Russia, where his exhibitions have until recently received state backing.

The situation changed immediately after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In March 2022, a solo exhibition by Bruskin opened at the state-owned New Tretyakov Gallery, one of Moscow’s main contemporary art spaces. But the exhibition was closed a month later, despite being scheduled to run until July.

Tretyakov management attributed this to “technical reasons,” but two sources told the BBC that an order had come from above to close the exhibition as authorities saw in Bruskin’s work a criticism of state ideology.

According to the Russian-language publication Art Guide, “outraged citizens” also filed denunciations against Bruskin.

This early closure was a landmark for Russian contemporary art, according to journalist and art historian Kira Dolinina.

“It’s noteworthy that war-time censorship began with Bruskin, the first Russian artist to achieve significant sales at Sotheby’s auctions [in 1988] and the figure who historically launched the Russian contemporary art market,” Dolinina notes.

When, four years later, ZILART founder and businessman Andrei Molchanov opened his museum with a Bruskin exhibition, curators called Molchanov “a brave man”, given “the difficulties of Bruskin’s reception by officials.”

Private museums can still afford to take risks that would be prohibited in state institutions, journalist and curator Marina Fedorovskaya told the BBC.

“In a private institution, as long as there’s no direct anti-war statement, you can take a risk and try something. In a public institution, there’s always nitpicking and reservations,” she said.

While some in the Russian art world used to claim there was no censorship, nobody is denying it now, she said.

“Your palette includes acrylics, pastels, and censorship,” Fedorovskaya quipped.

‘Nudes, take it down’

“The closer to the Kremlin [at the centre of Moscow], the less is allowed,” art historian Dolinina said of these new unspoken rules.

After galleries, she said, censorship is most clearly imposed at art fairs, which are often held at city or federal venues.

Before the opening of an art fair, “some guys in civilian clothes will come and examine the place,” a Russian curator told the BBC.

“They come and take down anything they deem questionable…Without this, they won’t let you open. They take down entire stands,” the source said.

The guidelines by which these unwelcome visitors operate aren’t always clear, complained one gallery owner. “It would be great if they wore uniforms and said, ‘Hello, I’m Major Petrov, remove the guy with the bare ass!’ But no…. [instead they say] ‘This is very dark, this is provocatively bright, remove it!’”

Several sources told the BBC that this on-the-ground censorship is carried out by employees of the Ministry of Culture and the Moscow Department of Culture, as well as officials from the presidential administration and security forces.

A curator mimicked the decision-making processes of such officials: “The artist was spotted at an [anti-war] rally, no, right away. There’s a dick in the painting, remove it. Nudes, take it down”.

At a recent art fair, the organisers hastily covered the word “sex” on one of the paintings with masking tape, a source told the BBC. “We don’t have gays, sex, or war at our Moscow fairs. So there’s no point in even mentioning it,” a Moscow gallery owner said.

Besides government censors, private pro-war activists attend exhibitions and then file denunciations.

For example, a recent exhibition by model and artist Danila Polyakov was closed early after complaints that it featured “perverted androgynous men instead of the heroes of the special military operation [full-scale invasion of Ukraine].”

Fear and uncertainty trigger self-censorship. “We were preparing an exhibition and decided not to show a photograph of a white dove. Just in case,” the gallery owner said.

Dmitry Khankin, executive director of the privately-owned Triumph Gallery in Moscow, said the FSB had long overseen cultural institutions and set the criteria for selecting works.

He told the BBC: “There are lists of names of people who cannot be exhibited. You can resist, but then bomb disposal experts might arrive, seal off the fair, and spend four days searching for explosives.”

Khankin, however, seemed unperturbed by authorities’ repressive approach to contemporary art. “So what if they remove works? Censorship has been around for a long time. It’s the opposite side of freedom.”

Blacklists

Immediately after the war in Ukraine began, many professional communities signed collective anti-war appeals.

Cultural and artistic figures had their own letter, which more than 18,000 people signed in the first week of the war.

Artist Alisa Gorshenina signed the letter and has repeatedly expressed her position on social media. The cancellation of her exhibitions “was escalating,” even in private spaces, she said. Exhibitions in state institutions after the war began “were out of the question.”

“[Exhibition organisers] either don’t say anything to you, or they say, ‘You know why,’” Gorshenina told the BBC.

By last year, only one private gallery remained in Russia that would exhibit her work. Gorshenina left the country in the summer of 2025 after receiving several fines and being arrested for 10 days for posting an emoji on social media, which a court deemed “LGBT propaganda”.

In recent years, major art fairs have begun checking artists’ passport information and tax identification numbers in addition to the artwork itself, sources said. This is so that artists are not able to use professional pseudonyms to distance themselves from public anti-war statements, one gallery owner suggested.

According to a BBC source, government institutions have banned “even those who simply posted a black square,” which has been used as a protest symbol on social media.

“It doesn’t matter what these artists are painting, even a landscape, they’re not allowed anywhere,” the source added.

Artists can end up on official or implied blacklists for all sorts of other reasons, arts industry figures told the BBC.

An exhibition curator remembered how a Ministry of Culture employee told them to remove one work because the artist was born in Ukraine, and another because the artist had “a project about a hundred years ago that criticised the government”. Others find themselves blacklisted simply because they associate with anti-war figures.

Beating

One morning in September 2024, a lecturer at the Baza Institute of Contemporary Art - an independent Moscow-based school - was woken by a banging at his front door.

When the lecturer, who asked not to be named in this story, opened the door, masked security officers threw him to the floor.

“They handcuffed me and kicked me in the face several times,” he said.

When he refused to enter a password to unlock his phone, officers tasered him. “They took my girlfriend out of the apartment so she wouldn’t see and started shocking me with a stun gun. I didn’t hold back for long. After about 30 seconds, I gave up the password.”

During the search, he was also asked to open a Google Drive containing videos of “Baza” lectures on contemporary art.

Searches were conducted at the homes of five Baza teachers and at the institute itself.

Baza was founded in 2011 by huband-and-wife team Anatoly Osmolovsky - an artist and art theorist - and Svetlana Baskova, director and curator.

Baskova said the official reason for the raids was to search for drugs, but none were found.

Osmolovsky and Baskova had already left Russia following a search on their own home and, after the series of raids in September, they decided to shut the institution entirely.

The lecturer who said he was beaten by security officers told the BBC he believed the searches were conducted to intimidate and lead to this exact outcome.

He said: “Apparently, they thought that the education at Baza was highly politicised and that they were cultivating dissidents. But, of course, that wasn’t the case.”

Myths, dogs, flowers

“Censorship in today’s Russia has a simple structure,” said one celebrated figure of Russian art. “There’s the gallery director, the curators, the art critics, the artist. Nobody wants to go to jail, nobody wants any difficulties.

“The artists won’t do anything to rock the boat. The curators mount exhibitions with themes like [...] fairy tales, folklore, and explorations of strange mythical and metaphysical themes. As long as it’s not about life or reality.”

A Moscow gallery owner said: “Nobody here is actively engaging in allegory or trying to create under-the-radar anti-war pieces. Everyone’s tired, resigned, and working. Because the market is good right now, and there are quite a lot of buyers.”

Despite the political crackdown, 2024 saw “crazy” sales, he said.

“In dark times, everyone, not just in Russia, craves calm art,” the gallerist said. Buyers now are largely looking for pieces they can “hang over the sofa” and opting for images of “flowers and dogs,” he added.

But others, without publicly advertising the fact, are seeking out works that censors remove from art fairs.

“It’s becoming a market mechanism, because such works sell for even more than they otherwise would,” said art critic Igor Grebelnikov.

“If it’s removed, it means it’s a good work, you have to buy it,” confirmed the gallery owner.

An artist whose paintings were removed from a Moscow art fair told the BBC that he had indeed sold many works in this way. “But I don’t consider this a success,” he said. “We simply sold a lot of works that were removed, but if they hadn’t been removed, we would have sold more.”

Grebelnikov compared what is happening now with contemporary art in Russia to the Soviet Union, when artists had to “constantly check” party policy.

But censorship was different in Soviet times, said a well-known Russian artist. Back then, it was handled by art historians, while now, exhibitions are attended by security forces who know nothing about art, he said.

Under Soviet rule, it was generally clear what was allowed and what wasn’t, and if you pushed back against censorship, you knew the consequences, said Anatoly Osmolovsky. Now, “it’s completely unclear how the authorities will react” to certain pieces.

Actively pro-war art remains a marginalised scene, Osmolovsky added. “People haven’t rushed to glorify war, the Russian army, or Putin [in the contemporary art world],” he said.

The curator and art historian Andrey Erofeev believes that the Russian state no longer plans to develop or support contemporary art.

“Russia has adopted a course similar to China’s policy toward contemporary art,” Erofeev told the BBC. “It remains the preserve of private institutions, as in China, while state institutions ignore it”.

One art market source agreed, saying: “The state abandoned its support for contemporary art, and they failed to create anything of their own in its place. My guess is that they didn’t really try”.

‘Blocked here and there’

The question remains how Russian art should be represented on the global stage, such as at the Venice Biennale next month. Some have suggested that these spaces should be reserved for artists opposed to the current Kremlin regime.

“Everywhere where the state has been pushed aside [due to sanctions], from the Venice Biennale to Eurovision, we want Russian anti-war art to be represented,” gallery owner Marat Gelman, who now lives outside Russia, told the BBC in an interview last year.

So far, Gelman’s hopes have not been realized. This year, Russia was invited to the Venice Biennale for the first time since the war began. Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has announced the group’s intention to protest the event.

In the meantime, contemporary Russian artists find themselves trapped between East and West.

One prominent artist who works in both Russia and Europe told the BBC that, despite the repressive climate, he still gets most of his exposure and income in his home country. “Russians are not allowed to participate in Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions. And it’s a real problem: you’re blocked both there and here.”

Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Theo Merz.

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The negotiations on peace in Ukraine are stalling, with both Moscow and Kyiv admitting there has been a “pause” in talks. Publicly, the two sides explain this by the US shifting its focus to Iran in the past month.

But sources close to the negotiations have told the BBC the pause had occurred before the escalation in the Middle East, caused by a lack of progress on key issues. Specifically, Moscow and Kyiv cannot agree on Russian demands for Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the territories it still controls in the eastern region of Donbas and long-term security guarantees.

Meanwhile, the Russian offensive in Ukraine, affected by changing weather conditions and new Ukrainian drone tactics, has slowed sharply in the first months of 2026.

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Has the peace process ‘run out of steam’?

The latest round of negotiations between Ukraine, Russia and the US took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in mid-February. After that, the participants promised to continue consultations in the very near future.

But as of late March, no new date or location for the next round of talks had been announced.

The Ukrainian delegation flew to Florida for bilateral talks with the US on 21 March, but the Russians did not attend.

Both Moscow and Kyiv officially explain such a long pause between negotiation rounds because of the US-Israel war against Iran.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with the BBC earlier this month that there was “only one reason” why trilateral talks were being constantly postponed - “the war in Iran”.

“Right now, American negotiators have other priorities,” the Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov commented.

But, as one senior European diplomat and two sources familiar with previous meetings told the BBC, the trilateral peace process had begun to “run out of steam” even before the start of the war with Iran.

The sources the BBC spoke to doubt that the negotiations in their current form can lead to the end of the war in Ukraine, as the key political problems remain unresolved - among them, the fate of the Donbas territories controlled by Ukraine.

Since 2022, Russia has occupied most of the region in eastern Ukraine, but Kyiv still maintains control over a critical part of it.

Last month, Zelensky said the Ukrainian people would not accept a unilateral withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donbas, as Russia demands. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously said that without such a withdrawal, he would not stop the fighting.

The US proposed turning the disputed territories into a “free economic zone” - something that Kyiv and Moscow said separately they were ready to discuss. But their conditions were very different.

Russia insisted that what it called a “demilitarised zone” should be under the control of the Russian police and the National Guard (a unit, established in 2016, which has been described as Putin’s “private army”) - something that Ukraine would not accept.

Ukraine proposed deploying a peacekeeping contingent to the Donbas, according to the New York Times newspaper. But this was unacceptable to Moscow, which is strongly opposed to the presence of any Nato troops in Ukraine.

As a result, according to one source who spoke to the BBC, Russia’s interest in the idea of a special economic zone has declined.

The other question that has not been resolved is that of security guarantees.

Ukraine has repeatedly made it clear that it is ready to discuss any territorial questions only after agreeing on legally binding international security guarantees that would prevent any new war. Kyiv even proposed a collective defence model that would work similarly to Nato’s Article 5 (which holds that Nato members will come to the defence of an ally under attack).

Despite the US and Ukraine saying earlier this year that a package of security guarantees was nearly agreed, it has yet to be signed.

One source familiar with the negotiations has told the BBC the situation was a vicious circle: without guarantees, Ukraine cannot discuss the territorial issue, and without resolving the territorial issue, any other progress in negotiations is hard to imagine.

Zelensky in a recent interview with Reuters news agency admitted that the US links security guarantees for Ukraine to it giving up land in the Donbas.

Responding to BBC questions about the stalling negotiations, Peskov said “nothing has begun to run out of steam”.

“From the very beginning, it was clear that the trilateral negotiations would not be easy,” Peskov said, adding that Moscow hopes the talks “will continue in the near future”.

Representatives of the Ukrainian delegation recently contacted on the subject did not respond to the BBC’s questions.

‘Putin needs not just Donbas’

There are other obstacles to a lasting peace in Ukraine - but they have not even begun to be discussed, people familiar with the negotiations have told the BBC.

In 2021, ahead of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following year, Putin presented the US and Nato with an ultimatum, demanding that the alliance halt its expansion eastwards, towards Russian borders, and withdraw all its forces from the countries that joined Nato after 1997.

The US rejected this, and Nato has since insisted it will not abandon its open-door policy to new members joining.

But these concerns remain important for Putin, two people familiar with the negotiations have told the BBC.

The problem is that Nato’s presence in Europe cannot be discussed without European countries - but Russia is strongly opposing them joining the talks.

When recently asked by the BBC, Putin’s spokesman Peskov acknowledged that Europe’s participation would be necessary at some point, but said that today the Kremlin believes Europe wants to “continue fighting with the hands of Ukrainians”.

European leaders insist they must be at the negotiating table, but so far, they’ve been unable to secure a seat, blaming the Kremlin for the lack of diplomatic progress.

According to sources the BBC spoke to, another reason why broader European security is not being discussed in the trilateral talks is that US representatives “misunderstand Russia’s priorities”.

“Putin needs not just Donbas. He needs sovereignty over Ukraine,” a senior European diplomat told the BBC.

But Russia has focused on its territorial demands rather than pushing its vision of “security guarantees” to put pressure on Ukraine and make Kyiv look unreasonable in Trump’s eyes, a senior European diplomat says.

“Russia’s goal is for Trump to blame Zelensky for being uncooperative,” the diplomat explains.

At the same time, Putin, for now, is not particularly interested in negotiations, as he believes he is winning the war, the diplomat adds. In recent months, the Russian president has repeatedly said Russia can achieve all its goals on the battlefield.

But the reality on the ground suggests that Russia may be in a more difficult position than the Russian president portrays.

What is happening on the ground?

On the front line in eastern Ukraine, including in the Donbas, the advance of Russian troops in the first months of 2026 has slowed down sharply.

In January 2026, the Russian army captured about 240 sq km, in February 120 sq km, and in the first half of March about 50 sq km, according to OSINT projects.

In comparison, last year, Russia on average managed to capture about 400 sq km of Ukrainian territory per month.

Considering that during the January-March 2026 period, Ukraine liberated more than 400 sq km during two separate counter-offensives, overall Russian territorial gains in Ukraine since the beginning of the year are close to zero.

The slowdown in the pace of the Russian advance may be caused by seasonal factors and weather conditions, such as freezing winter and spring thaw.

But there is also another factor, and that’s the Ukrainian armed forces changing their drone tactics.

Until recently, most Ukrainian drone forces were aimed at eliminating Russian personnel, but now their activity is increasingly shifting toward strikes on Russia’s rear - both near and deep.

Now the main targets of Ukrainian attacks are supply systems, communications, air defence and electronic warfare assets, drone control systems and the drone operators themselves.

Ukraine is also scaling up its drone production.

The so-called “kill zone” - the territory adjacent to the front line where any equipment or troops immediately become targets - is becoming deeper and more saturated with strike drones. Safe movement in the front line zone has become impossible.

As a result, the infiltration tactics used by the Russian army to capture Ukrainian towns are becoming less effective.

The Russian army has also began experiencing major communication problems after its troops lost access to SpaceX-made Starlink terminals, which used to provide good satellite connection in the field. The alternatives, such as analogue radio stations, are less functional and much more unreliable.

At the same time, Russia keeps pushing on many sectors of the front line, which remains stretched through 1,200km. It has been doing so for two years now, in a bid to weaken Ukrainian resistance by putting constant pressure along almost the entire front line.

But the results of this Russian offensive turned out to be quite modest, while losses were high.

According to estimates by the UK Ministry of Defence, in 2024 the Russian army lost 430,000 people killed and wounded, and in 2025 415,000.

Moscow has not published its own statistics on losses.

Russia is also trying to exhaust Ukrainian air defences, increasing the size, power and variety of its own drone forces. Recently, it again intensified missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure far away from the front line.

In short, Russia’s invasion in Ukraine has turned into a protracted war, where both sides are gradually adapting to each other’s tactics and developing counter-measures to destroy any advantages the other might have.

It is hard to see how the two sides will extricate themselves from this apparent deadlock.

This is a compilation of two stories originally published in Russian. You can read the stories in Russian here and here.

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When her seven-year-old daughter was told to learn a poem about Russia’s “glorious army” for a school event, Nina from Moscow thought it was too much.

She has struggled to shield her daughter from an ever-increasing number of “patriotic” activities and lessons.

That ramping up of war propaganda directed at Russian children has been brought to life before a global audience in an Oscar-winning documentary, Mr Nobody Against Putin.

The BBC documentary was based on footage by a primary school events co-ordinator and videographer called Pavel Talankin in the small provincial town of Karabash in the Ural mountains.

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What troubles Nina most is that her daughter enjoys taking part in the state-backed patriotic programme. We have changed her name and others in this piece for their safety.

“She likes her teacher, she likes her classmates - she likes being a part of it,” says Nina.

Nina worries that openly opposing school activities could isolate her daughter socially, and when she once kept her home to avoid a patriotic school event, her daughter was upset: “I don’t want her to feel like she doesn’t belong.”

Talankin’s BBC film documents how he was reluctantly drawn into Putin’s propaganda machine as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine unfolded in 2022.

Flag-raising ceremonies were introduced, as well as compulsory lessons to teach pupils about the government’s take on Russian values and world events.

History books were re-written and updated to include latest developments, including what Russians were told was a “special military operation”.

Those diktats have continued. Only last month Russia’s education ministry announced plans to introduce a list of state-approved toys and games for nurseries, to promote “traditional Russian values”.

The messages the government wants the children to absorb are clear: the invasion is a defensive war and patriotism means unquestioning loyalty. At home though, some encounter different views.

Maksim, eight, lists everything he has learnt in his patriotic education lessons: about great Russian poets and painters, about friendship and how not to quarrel. His excitement grows as he remembers discussions about robots, tanks and laser tag.

“They told us this is how to prepare for war,” he says.

Like Nina, Maksim’s mother Marina opposes Russia’s invasion. But she avoids openly discussing it in front of her son, in case he repeats what she says in public.

“An active anti-war position might attract unwanted attention”, Marina tells the BBC.

Navigating a line between the messages from school and what they say at home is difficult, says Anastasia Rubtsova, a psychotherapist.

“A child has to live in this environment - attending the school, being a part of this group”, she says. “This doesn’t mean parents should agree with the propaganda. But there is no need to take a political stance in front of your child.”

She suggests that parents focus on universal values such as the importance of human life, and the idea that conflicts should always be resolved peacefully - instead of directly confronting school narratives.

Studies show younger children are particularly receptive to messages from figures of authority. “If you tell a young child that the war is good, they will accept it,” says Rubtsova.

According to Emily Willoughby, a researcher in behavioural genetics at the University of Minnesota, childhood and adolescence provide a genuine window of opportunity for shaping attitudes. The key question is whether those attitudes will persist, and that is where the individual’s broader social world plays a key part.

“When parents actively disagree with institutional messaging, family influence usually prevails in the long run,” she says.

However, when the state controls most sources of information and alternative narratives are limited, the outcome is less predictable. And that is very much the case in Russia.

One well-known study into Nazi-era education found that school-based indoctrination could have long-lasting effects, particularly when reinforced by the wider social environment.

Implementation of the Russian government’s guidelines varies widely.

Some schools follow them enthusiastically, while others soften or sidestep them. Teachers may adapt, dilute or quietly resist the messaging.

In one scene from Talankin’s film, children in Karabash are handed Russian flags as they gather in the school hall to listen to Putin announcing the creation of a children’s movement reminiscent of the old Soviet-era Pioneer youth organisation.

In another, a class is warned that the enemy will try to recruit from their communities and spread propaganda to defeat them from within.

The patriotic education lessons are known is Russian as “Conversations about Important Things”. Maia, a 14-year-old from St Petersburg, complains they are very boring.

“No one is participating in the discussion. We just sit there and listen to the teacher, and then leave,” she explains.

“Compelling citizens to engage in public performances of patriotism is a way of reminding citizens of the regime’s overwhelming power,” says Paul Goode, professor of Russian studies at Carleton University, Canada. That perception is reinforced by state-run media, state-commissioned public opinion polls and rigged elections, he adds.

To make the most of “patriotic education” in schools, Russian authorities in 2023 made it easier for school-leavers to join the army. Some have been lured by hefty signing-on payments, while others were simply convinced to take part in the war effort.

Maia, like her parents, believes Russia’s war is wrong but does not discuss it at school and does not know what her classmates think.

“At first I was worried that I couldn’t be friends with those who support the war and Putin,” she recalls. “But nowadays everyone behaves so neutrally that everything feels normal.”

Read this story in Russian here.

This story was published on BBC News Online.

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The Kremlin is tightening its grip over what Russians can do and see online, making it harder for outlets like the BBC to reach their audiences.

For the past 80 years BBC Russian has sought to bypass those restrictions, which for decades featured jamming of its short-wave radio broadcasts and now involve blocking its website.

Latest restrictions in Russia have included widespread mobile internet outages and a reported plan to block the Telegram news and messaging app.

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On 24 March 1946, the BBC started its first regular radio broadcast in the Russian language aiming at giving listeners behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union an alternative to state propaganda and a tightly controlled cultural scene.

By 1949, jamming of the signal was already the norm.

For almost half the 20th Century, Soviet people had to jump through hoops to listen to foreign broadcasts, and for some it was truly a sport, remembers Natalia Rubinstein, an ex-BBC presenter and former resident of Leningrad, or modern-day St Petersburg.

“We really wanted to know what was being hidden from us,” she says.

Rubinstein remembers how people who were fond of cross-country skiing – a very popular pastime in winter in Russia – used to take their radios with them out of town, where there were fewer jammers.

“I still have this picture before my eyes: a person leaning on a tree, with ski poles next to him, listening to the radio somehow nestled on their chest,” she recalls.

Jamming of foreign broadcasts was pioneered by Nazi Germany during World War Two, using noise or signals from more powerful transmitters located closer to the listeners.

During the Cold War, the BBC would repeat its 90-minute Russian-language bulletin three times a week, so people could listen at least once.

It was not all news: Soviets could tune in to Western rock music, hear extracts from banned literature and even, for a brief time, take part in quizzes.

“My dad used to listen to the ‘enemy voices’ at night,” reads one post on a forum dedicated to foreign-broadcast listeners.

“He would sit on a three-legged stool, press his forehead against the radio, and patiently, through the crackling and the wail of the jammers, tune in to the right frequency... it seemed as if those were the sounds of outer space reaching us.”

Not every broadcast was blocked. According to a CIA memo from 1960, stories about life in Britain or the US went on air without interference, but discussions of global conflicts or reports on the economic and political life in the Socialist bloc were always jammed.

Occasionally BBC Russian succeeded in outfoxing the jammers. Peter Udell, who ran the BBC’s East European service remembers what happened when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982.

“We went off air in Russian as usual at midnight, Moscow time. And then a few minutes later, unexpectedly for the jamming teams in the Soviet Union, we popped up again with a special programme on the Brezhnev death.

“And I believe, for a quite a few minutes, it went through clear because the jammers had assumed that they were off shift and perhaps had abandoned ship for the night.”

The secrecy and tardiness of Russian state media gave foreign broadcasters an advantage. In 1964 the BBC reported the removal of another Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, from power well before Russians heard about it at home.

By 1987, amid the liberal reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, Natalia Rubinstein was in London reading BBC news bulletins instead of just listening to them.

“We’ve just got a call from BBC Monitoring,” a studio manager said in her ear. “Ten minutes ago the Russians stopped the jamming. It’s official. We’re broadcasting without interference. You should tell our listeners that.”

For decades the BBC Russian team had only a faint idea of who their audience was. Finally now they were getting some feedback.

“First of all, we started receiving sacks of wonderful letters from the [Russian] provinces,” recalls Rubinstein. “Secondly, Russian radio stations – both regional and Moscow-based – started picking up our programmes.”

In 1988 BBC Russian listeners tuned in live to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher answering their questions. More than 800 calls came in from the whole of the USSR, and 15 of them made it to broadcast.

It was around that time that BBC Russian moved into its first office in Moscow, and by 2022, together with the team in London, the service had grown to more than 100 journalists competing with the best independent media in the country. Although the original platform of radio broadcasts had by now given way to the website and social media.

In the final week of February, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, BBC Russian’s weekly audience more than trebled in size, reaching 10 million people.

On 4 March 2022, the BBC’s website, as well as those of other main independent and foreign media, were blocked in Russia, accused of “spreading false information of public interest”.

New laws meant it was now illegal even to call the invasion a “war”, contradicting the official term “special military operation”.

For local BBC Russian staff it meant having to leave the country if they wanted to continue objectively and safely reporting on it. A new office was set up in the Latvian capital Riga.

That change has come at a real personal cost to every member of the BBC Russian team.

Eight BBC Russian journalists have been declared “foreign agents” by the Russian state, a status that recalls Soviet-era campaigns against “enemies of the people” and almost inevitably leads to criminal prosecution.

Jenny Norton, head of BBC News Russian, says with cuts to US foreign broadcast networks and independent Russian outlets struggling for funding, the BBC’s service is becoming an increasingly lonely but vital voice.

“A new generation of Russians are now having to fight to stay connected to the world,” she says. “And our team has to battle internet blocking and shutdowns to keep on reaching them.”

In the four years since the war began, Russia’s digital Iron Curtain has become increasingly hard to bypass.

One poll suggests 36% of Russians use virtual private networks to get around the blockade, but Russia’s internet watchdog is never far behind, blocking VPNs as they become popular.

Cities across Russia have seen internet outages, most recently in the capital Moscow, raising fears that only a “whitelist” of government-approved services and websites will be available during shutdowns, similar to one used in Iran.

The most popular messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, are being restricted in favour of the government-backed Max.

Russians are still defying the blockade, always adept at finding new ways to access our journalism. The current audience is up to 12 million people a week, proving the need for BBC Russian is as strong as it was in 1946.

Read this story in Russian here.

This story was published on BBC News Online.

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Two Russians have gone on trial in Angola accused of stirring up anti-government protests, conducting a campaign of disinformation, and attempting to interfere in next year’s presidential election.

Arrested last August, political consultant Igor Ratchin and translator Lev Lakshtanov are facing 11 charges, including terrorism, espionage and influence peddling.

The BBC has obtained a copy of the indictment that includes charges relating to an alleged operation aimed at changing the political course of Angola.

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The Russians’ lawyers challenge the indictment on the grounds that it lacks “concrete and objective facts”.

According to the prosecution, the Russians acted on behalf of Africa Politology, a shadowy network of operatives and intelligence officers in Africa that emerged from the now-defunct Wagner Group, whose founder Yevgeny Prigozhin died in 2023 in a plane crash.

Political operatives linked to Wagner have been active across Africa for more than a decade, in particular in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Madagascar.

The Russians’ defence team says they are not connected to Africa Politology or the Wagner Group, were not acting on behalf of the Russian state, and were instead cooperating to create a cultural “Russian House” in Luanda.

Angola is a top African oil producer and diamond exporter. Its natural resources and strategic position make it a country of continued interest for Moscow. But while ties date back to the Cold War, Angola has been gradually drifting away from Russia’s sphere of influence.

Russian diamond mining company Alrosa and bank VTB were forced to leave Angola due to international sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine war.

Angolan President João Lourenço has pivoted towards the West, and has not met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin since 2019.

The Russian operatives in Africa were breaking new ground by moving into Angola, it is claimed.

“This is indicative of Russian anxiety of the direction of travel of Angola under the Lourenço administration,” says Alex Vines, Africa programme director at think-tank European Council on Foreign Relations.

“There’s clearly an element of Russian disinformation to try and build up more sympathy towards the Russian Federation.”

Alongside the Russians, two Angolans will also face trial for their alleged part in the Russian-linked influence operation.

The prosecution alleges the Russians hired sports journalist Amor Carlos Tomé and political activist Francisco Oliveira to conduct their activities in the country.

They are facing nine and five charges respectively, including terrorism, espionage, and influence peddling.

The legal team representing the Angolan defendants say there isn’t sufficient evidence against them and that “the accusation is based on mere conjecture”.

Prosecutors say the first team of Russian operatives arrived in Angola’s capital, Luanda, in 2024 under the pretext of opening a Russian cultural centre, a project that never materialised.

Among the initial arrivals was Maxim Shugalei, a prominent Wagner-linked political operative sanctioned by the European Union (EU) for overseeing disinformation campaigns, whose activities in Africa were turned into a film trilogy, seemingly sponsored by Prigozhin.

He travelled to Angola with his long-term translator, Samer Suaifan. The BBC has contacted both men.

While Suaifan has acknowledged being acquainted with the defendants, Shugalei has denied knowing them.

According to the indictment, during 2024-2025 the defendants made multiple payments to local journalists and experts to disseminate propaganda and disinformation in local media with the goal of “provoking political change”. The payments add up to over $24,000 (£17,900).

Angolan authorities see this work as part of a broader influence operation intended to undermine trust in Western partners and discredit President Lourenço’s foreign policy.

One insider, who previously worked with Prigozhin on African projects, criticised these efforts as amateurish.

“This year [2025] they handed the whole African topic over to some complete idiots. It feels like they were just picked up at the Sadovod market [a street market in Moscow]. And right before New Year they really wanted publications in Angolan media. But I told them all to go to hell,” a political strategist told the BBC, without revealing who the employers were.

The prosecution cites some publications as evidence of the disinformation campaign carried out by the two Russian men.

A January 2025 post on a Facebook page that imitated recognised local news site Angola 24 Horas, calling itself a satirical page, warned that Angola could be drawn into the Ukraine war.

In December 2024 a post on the same page criticised the Lobito Corridor, a Western-backed rail project, which moves minerals from central Africa to Angola’s ports.

The post claimed foreign firms gain near-total access to Angola’s minerals. The BBC contacted the satirical page Angola 24 Horas but did not receive a response.

The post about the Lobito Corridor appeared on news website Lil Pasta News a day later. Another article published by the website speculated whether the country had “signed a pact with the Devil” by joining the project.

Lil Pasta News told the BBC that the articles in question were not written by its team but received through an intermediary. The team said that it had no contact with the author and was not paid for the publication.

The lawyers representing the Russian defendants argue that there is no evidence to suggest that Ratchin commissioned any of the articles.

Angolan prosecutors portray the group as a small but effective network. Ratchin was allegedly at its centre.

He had previously worked on several regional election campaigns in Russia that, as he claimed himself in a video seen by the BBC, ended in victories for his candidates.

Lakshtanov has worked as a translator in Angola since the Soviet era. Prosecutors believe he played a supporting role in the operation, acting primarily as a translator.

The local connection was supposedly provided by Francisco “Buka Tanda” Oliveira, a youth leader for Angola’s main opposition party, Unita, who speaks Russian after having studied chemical engineering in Russia between 2015 and 2019.

The prosecution claims he was tasked with introducing Angolan politicians to the defendants.

“He [Oliveira] doesn’t know this organisation [Politology] and any activity related to this organisation. All he knows is that they wanted to create Russian culture house,” says defence lawyer Pedro Cangombe.

Tomé, a sports journalist at Angolan state TV channel TPA, is accused of gathering information on the country’s political landscape and potential presidential candidates, as well as helping to produce and publish content linked to the alleged influence operation.

The defence for Tomé argues that “none of the subjective or objective elements” of crimes are “minimally” demonstrated in the indictment.

The indictment names six more Russian members of the network who allegedly rotated in and out of Angola at various times in 2024 and 2025.

Angolan authorities also claim in the indictment that Lakshtanov and Ratchin met several senior political figures from both the ruling MPLA party and Unita, offering support and funding for campaign activities.

Most notably, the prosecution alleges they held a meeting with MPLA heavyweight General Higino Carneiro and Unita’s leader Adalberto Costa Junior.

Both are regarded as potential presidential candidates for next year’s election.

Prosecutors claim the Russians offered Carneiro up to $15m (£11m) in campaign support, alongside security assistance, strategic advice, and intelligence gathering.

There was no evidence about this alleged offer in the indictment we have seen.

“I don’t know whether such a meeting took place,” says Elizeu Nguiniti, the lawyer representing Ratchin and Lakshtanov.

Unita representative Jonas Mulato told the BBC that allegations linking the party’s leader to foreign influence operation are false and it had become “increasingly evident” that judicial proceedings were being used for political purposes.

The BBC requested a comment from Carneiro but did not receive a response.

Agitators or scapegoats?

Last July, Angola saw the deadliest protests since the end of a civil war between Unita and the MPLA in 2002.

What started as a peaceful taxi drivers’ strike in Luanda quickly grew into nationwide unrest that turned violent.

Protesters were met with what activists describe as “excessive” police force.

According to official figures, at least 29 people died and more than 1,200 were arrested.

The prosecution alleges the defendants orchestrated the protests, pointing to notes about the demonstrations found on their mobile phones and photos taken by Ratchin.

In legal papers seen by the BBC, Ratchin’s lawyers say he took the images for safety reasons, so he would have evidence if he were attacked. The BBC hasn’t seen the photos or the notes.

Many Angolan journalists and activists strongly contest the idea that the protests weren’t organic, and say Angolan authorities might be using the Russians as scapegoats.

The World Bank estimates that almost 40% of Angolans could be living below the international poverty line of $3 per day.

“People were protesting because of their living conditions, not because someone from another country told them to,” says Sheila Nhancale, Angola researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The indictment itself has been criticised. It contains misspellings and apparent factual errors.

For example, prosecutors say the Russian operation began on 9 October 2024 with the arrival of Maxim Shugalei and others, but Shugalei was arrested in Chad on 19 September 2024 and returned to Moscow in 16 November 2024.

The BBC has requested clarification from the Angolan prosecution about this and other inconsistencies, but received no response.

Rui Verde, a legal expert and a research associate at the UK-based University of Oxford’s African Studies Centre, says the key challenge for the prosecution will be to show that the acts listed in the indictment form a deliberate pattern, a kind of intentional roadmap to subversion.

According to several sources, the Russians could be sent back to their homeland if convicted.

But Russian authorities do not seem in a hurry to offer help.

A source close to the Russian diplomatic community told the BBC that “the logic is simple: these people were not carrying out official state tasks, they were just contractors. Russia’s position in the country is already weak, so there’s no point making things worse”.

“Let these remnants of Prigozhin’s operation sort it out themselves,” the source said.

Read this story in Russian here.

This story was published on BBC News Online.

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In the 1970s, at the height of Soviet jamming of the BBC, the most coveted short- wave radios in the USSR were made by the VEF factory in Latvia – which was then part of the Soviet Union.

A generation of young Russians grew up learning how to twist the dial with great precision, to find whichever BBC signal had somehow bypassed the howling and whistling of the jammers. When you found it, it a window opened into a whole other world - of uncensored news, literature and western pop music, all coming to you live from London.

Those days are long gone. The jamming stations have all closed down. The VEF factory doesn’t make radios anymore. And Latvia is now an independent country. But since the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the information space in Russia has been shrinking.

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A new generation of Russians are now having to fight to stay connected to the world. And our team has to battle internet blocking and shutdowns to keep on reaching them. Four years ago, the Russian Service Moscow newsroom had to leave Russia but their work continues in exile, and their new home by a twist of fate just happens to be in Latvia.

Over the past eighty years history often seems to have repeated itself.

Take the first ever Russian Service radio news bulletin from 24^th March 1946. The news reader was the splendidly named Mrs Sonia – Betty – Horsfall. The top story was all about Iran – and the ongoing negotiations for Soviet troops to withdraw after their wartime occupation.

Now it’s the US-Israeli war on Iran that’s dominating the news. And to reach audiences in Russia in 2026, we have to tell the story in a myriad of ways across different platforms. Our website is blocked in Russia - as are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Tiktok, and WhatsApp. The messenger app Telegram used to be our only uncensored way of getting information in and out of Russia. But not any more.

These days Russians can only reach the BBC website and social media channels – and many other banned sites - by using VPNs - virtual private networks, which allow them to bypass the censors. Everyone from young people to the shortwave radio generation has had to learn how to do it. “But what will we do if they start blocking VPNs and shutdown internet access altogether?” one of our team asked the other day.

It’s a question we often ask our colleagues in BBC News Persian, who are now reporting the war on their country despite an almost complete internet blackout in Iran. We have so much to learn from them - and increasingly, sadly, so much in common with them.

We had to leave Russia in 2022 because it was no longer safe for our staff to continue doing their jobs there. Even calling Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine a war, was against the law.

Getting nearly 50 shell-shocked BBC Russian journalists, their families and their pets out of Russia and into Latvia now feels like the easy bit. Building new lives, learning a new language, and finding new ways to keep reporting Russia from the outside has been a much tougher challenge.

“The thing that’s really helped is knowing we’re all in this together and we can all support each other,” says one of our team.

But everyone has paid the price for carrying on. No-one can travel safely back to Russia. Home and family have become unreachable. Reunions have to happen in third countries.

And even in exile our staff are still being pursued. Eight have been designated ‘foreign agents’ by the authorities in Russia - required by law to put disclaimers on all their published work, taken to court and fined in absentia for failing to comply, heading inevitably towards criminal prosecution.

“If I get a criminal record in Russia, then the list of places where I can safely meet my Mum is going to get even shorter,” one colleague told me the other day.

There have already been cases of Russians discovering too late that they’re on the international wanted list in countries friendly to Moscow.

When the Russian Service first went on air, Winston Churchill had just made his famous post-war speech warning that an iron curtain was coming down over Eastern Europe. In 2026 a digital version of that iron curtain has come down again.

The post-revolutionary emigres and the Cold War exiles who lead the Russian Service in those earlier radio days, have now been replaced by a new generation who never thought that one day it would be their turn to leave.

“The Russia I grew up in has completely disappeared,” says one of our ex-Moscow team. “In the blink of an eye the freedom, the possibilities, and the excitement have all gone. I don’t want to think that I’ll never go back,” she adds “But right now it’s hard to believe.”

Russians clearly want more than their state-controlled news media is currently giving them and after 80 years, I hope our first newsreader Mrs Horsfall would be proud to see how many of them still trust the BBC.

This story was broadcast on ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, on BBC Radio 4 on 21st March 2026.

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The Russian Justice Ministry’s regularly updated ‘foreign agents list’ has long been a mechanism to silence journalists, activists and opposition supporters. But since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine a small number of politically loyal businesspeople with no connection to opposition politics have also been added to the list. Lawyers acting for some of these individuals say their clients were designated on the basis of fabricated stories published on news sites in Europe and designed to damage their reputations. Foreign agent status has effectively prevented them from continuing to run their businesses.

In July 2025 a small news outlet in Belgium published a story about a Russian businessman called Aleksey Shevtsov. The piece attracted little attention at the time. But it was to become a key factor in a series of events which resulted in Shevstov losing the multi-million-dollar business empire he had built up over the previous two decades.

CHAPTER ONE: THE LORD OF THE MANOR

Residents of the picture-book Volga town of Plyos used to call Alexey Shevtsov “the lord of the manor.”

The businessman and philanthropist set up home in then rundown provincial town in the early 2000s and over the next two decades he transformed it into a playground for Russia’s elite, complete with five-star hotels, restaurants and a yacht club.

Born in Orsk, near the border with Kazakhstan, Shevtsov made his money in the oil industry before buying and then selling a controlling stake in a big local machine building enterprise.

After banking a reported 15 million US dollars, Shevtsov moved to Plyos, then a town of just 1800 people, and somewhere that for him held fond memories of childhood summer holidays with his grandmother.

Over the next two decades he would go on to spend more than a billion roubles developing the town – according to estimates by Forbes magazine in 2021.

“Before Shevtsov, this was a town with dirty streets, buried knee-deep in snow in winter. No cafés, no nothing, A complete dump,” a local journalist told the BBC on condition of anonymity.

Shevtsov opened a boutique hotel complex aimed at wealthy and well-connected visitors. Among his first guests were Prince Michael of Kent and his wife – minor members of the British royal family, who visited Plyos in 2005.

Shevtsov was so proud royalty had stayed in his hotel that he had a plaque made to commemorate their visit.

In the summer of 2008, Shevtsov’s guest list notched up an even more illustrious customer, when the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, dined at his Yacht Club restaurant. Another plaque was put up to commemorate the event, but the visit was to have an important postscript.

Medvedev liked Plyos so much that he bought a nearby country estate. Other officials followed, leading Bloomberg and Reuters to dub Plyos “the second Rublyovka,” – a reference to the elite Moscow suburb.

In 2010 Shevtsov had become the head of Plyos - a largely ceremonial role which he held for a year. He gave the then Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets a tour of the town and entertained another summer resident – Vladimir Putin’s senior advisor Yuri Ushakov.

The commemorative plaques continued to go up.

It was around this time that another well-connected visitor began frequenting the town. Timerbulat Karimov was a successful businessman, and the son-in-law of Igor Sechin, the hugely influential Kremlin insider and head of oil company Rosneft.

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Marketing genius

By the time Russia’s political elite starting visiting Plyos, the town had been completely transformed.

“He had a good hotel on the Volga where I always stayed,” a former government staffer told the BBC. “The sauna attendant loved telling stories about what a cool guy Shevtsov was and how everyone in town respected him.”

In conversations with the BBC, Shevtsov’s acquaintances remember what they say was his ‘genius’ for repackaging traditional Russian country life into something glamorous and new.

There were the little Russian fish pies he boxed up and sold to long queues of eager tourists.

He also pioneered a Russian version of glamping, which he rebranded ‘izbing’ – offering tourists the chance to stay in an izba - a renovated traditional Russian wooden house - where they could experience the simple countryside life but with internet, and bathrooms.

But Shevtsov’s main income came from selling summer homes to well-heeled Russians. He would buy up run down wooden houses for a song, renovate them and sell them on for a huge profit.

The more popular Plyos became, the higher property prices soared. It didn’t always make him popular with the locals, as one former resident told the BBC.

Among those who bought a house from Shevtsov were Igor Sechin’s son-in-law, Timerbulat Karimov, and his wife Inga.

“Karimov really liked it here, “ says one local resident. “He said it reminded him of Ufa, where he grew up.”

In 2015, a group of summer residents persuaded Karimov to stand in the upcoming election for a new head of Plyos. He won and immediately began making his own mark on the town.

“He invested funds in projects across the town,” says a local resident. “He made a point of knocking down buildings that didn’t comply with regulations, hiring excavators for demolition with his own money.”

And if the locals used to called Shevtsov ‘the lord of the manor’, they thought up a new name for Karimov – ‘the tsar’.

He and his wife began buying up local property – including one of Shevtsov’s hotels - the Fortecia Rus. According to Forbes sources, in 2021 Karimov paid about 150 million roubles (just over two million US dollars) for it.

The hotel sale resulted in a big falling-out between the two men.

Shevtsov told the media Karimov had demanded he give back “more than 20 million roubles” of the sale money. It’s not clear why. In his role as head of Plyos, Karimov also imposed a tax on the sale “for the needs of the town”.

In response, Shevtsov accused Karimov of “systematically destroying him”.

At the end of September 2025, Shevtsov’s problems intensified when the Ivanovo Region prosecutor’s office accused him of abusing position as mayor to acquire a property empire.

In October a court nationalized 150 properties belonging to Shevtsov and his family, with a total value exceeding one billion roubles.

Shevtsov hit back denying he had ever used public money for his projects.

“I invested in restoring property in Plyos and creating a modern hospitality industry in the town using funds obtained from the sale of a machine-building plant in the Urals,” Shevtsov told Kommersant newspaper.

A week before the court ruling, came more bad news. The Ministry of Justice added Shevstov’s name to its list of “foreign agents”. One of the reasons given was “comments to foreign-agent media or foreign media”.

In July 2025, in the midst of the Shevtsov’s legal problems, a Brussel-based news site called EU Reporter had published a story from an unnamed contributor which claimed to be the transcript of a conversation with Shevtsov in which he appeared to make some highly critical comments about the situation in Russia.

Shevtsov’s lawyers say it was this article which provided the pretext for the Justice Ministry’s decision.

For Shevtsov the designation was a huge blow.

“For a person living and working in Russia, patriotic in outlook and unconnected to abroad, being declared a foreign agent is a harsh, stigmatizing punishment akin to a pre-revolutionary civic execution,” his daughter, Anastasia Shevtsova wrote in a post on her Telegram channel.

A friend told the BBC Shevtsov’s first reaction was to tear the memorial plates commemorating illustrious past guests off the walls of his hotels and restaurants.

“He ripped them out by the roots, leaving emptiness behind. If I can’t have it, no-one can—that was the logic,” the friend told the BBC.

CHAPTER TWO: THE WIDOW

Aleksei Shevtsov was not the first Russian entrepreneur whose business career came to an abrupt end thanks to a foreign agent designation.

Three years earlier exactly the same thing had happened Katerina Bosov – the widow of Russia’s “coal king” Dmitry Bosov.

Dmitry and Katerina Bosov met in Nice in 2016 and got married the following year.

He was the 47-year old head of a hugely successful business empire which included Sibanthracite, one of the biggest players on the Russian anthracite coal market. He was on first name terms with people at the very top of Russian politics, including both Vladimir Putin, and Rosneft boss, Igor Sechin.

She was a 27-year old Moscow-trained corporate lawyer who had made a career working for companies owned by Vladimir Gruzdev, the businessman and former governor of Tula Region.

Friends told the BBC Bosov had completely lost his head over Katerina, who was his third wife. “He was ready to do anything for her,” one told the BBC.

Born in the Siberian town of Barnaul, Dmitry Bosov made his fortune in Moscow in the 1990s. By 2018, his company Sibanthracite controlled 21% of the hugely lucrative Russian high-grade anthracite coal market. In 2020 he made it onto the Russian Forbes list of dollar billionaires.

“Super-fast, super-smart, a thrill seeker,” says a friend who has known Dmitry Bosov since their student days.

Bosov had a wide range of interests. A keen hockey player, his company sponsored President Putin’s Night Hockey league. He went heli-skiing in Greenland, produced electronic music, and invested about 200 million US dollars in medical marijuana production.

It was the latter business that took him to California for an ill-fated spell running a company aiming to cash in on what friends called “the California medical marijuana gold rush”. Bosov’s US visa was revoked in 2019 with no explanation. The business collapsed the following year.

Bosov returned to Russia just as the covid pandemic was shutting down everyday life across the world. Friends say that for someone who was fearless in so many other aspects of life, Bosov suddenly seemed very afraid of getting sick. He shut himself away at his estate outside Moscow and started taking high doses of an antimalarial drug which he believed (wrongly) could be effective in treating covid.

On 6 May 2020 Katerina Bosov found her 52-year old husband’s body in the locker room of his private ice hockey arena. An investigation found that he had shot himself.

Court battles

Two months after her husband’s death, Katerina Bosov took control of Sibanthracite.

Dmitry’s will had left equal shares in his business to eight heirs- Katerina, their daughter, his parents and his four sons from previous marriages. The family nominated Katerina to chair the board of Sibanthracite, because they thought her legal training would make her well placed to defend all their interests.

But things didn’t turn out as they had hoped.

At the end of August 2020 Katerina staked a claim to a much bigger, 43 per cent share of the business, saying that as Bosov’s wife she was entitled to a joint share in her husband’s estate. The family – who only found out via documents from the Federal Tax Service - were outraged.

It was the start of major legal battle.

In November 2020, a court ruled in favour of the family and Katerina’s bid to grab a bigger share of the company was deemed unlawful.

Almost immediately reports began to circulate in the Russian media that a property magnate called Albert Avdolyan was interested in buying Sibanthracite. Avdolyan as the reports noted, was a close friend and business partner of Sergei Chemezov, the influential head of Rostec, Russia’s huge state-owned defence conglomerate.

Katerina tried and failed to block the sale of Sibanthracite through the courts, and in October 2021 it was sold to Albert Avdolyan. Sources at Kommersant valued the company at one billion US dollars.

Katerina fought on, taking her case to the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court – both of which ruled against her.

But what happened next would be the final nail in the coffin for her attempts to turn her fortunes around in Russia.

In August 2022 a little-known French-language news site called Facta Media published what it said was an interview with Katerina.

Although she had never spoken out publicly about politics and had in fact actively avoided publicity, in the ‘interview’ she appeared to be sharing her thoughts on everything from the war in Ukraine and the death of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, to why she believed the security services were responsible for her husband’s death.

Two months later, on October 22, 2022, the Ministry of Justice designated Katerina Bosov a foreign agent – “for political activity with financial support from Ukraine”.

She was living abroad in Italy at this time, and the ruling effectively meant she could not return to Russia.

The BBC approached the Bosov family for comment. Dmitry’s father Boris said: “I’m not ready to share any information about my family, including about Yekaterina. I don’t want my son’s name mentioned in the press.”

In a statement to the BBC, a spokesman for Albert Avdolyan said there was no connection between the sale of Sibanthracite and Katerina Bosov’s designation as a foreign agent.

“The process of acquiring assets began in 2021 and was completed by the summer of 2022. Katerina Bosov received her foreign agent designation later in the autumn of 2022,” the statement said. “Chronologcially these events do not intersect and there is no basis to talk about either the impact of this decision on the deal, or the interests of the new owners in such a status.”

CHAPTER THREE: NO-ONE WILL HIRE ME NOW

Being branded a foreign agent makes it impossible for businesspeople in Russia to continue their activities, says entrepreneur and YouTuber Dmitry Potapenko, who was designated in 2024.

Unlike Aleksei Shevtsov and Katerina Bosov his designation was not connected to stories published in foreign news sites. But the impact on his business, which had an annual turnover of three to four hundred million roubles, was devastating.

“You are completely stripped of your rights; your accounts are frozen,” he told the BBC. “You can’t, for example, pass compliance checks at a bank— a red line immediately pops up. No one here will hire me now – not even as a janitor.”

Potapenko told the BBC that using the foreign agent laws seemed to have become a new way to resolve a business dispute – usually in cases where a much bigger player was at odds with someone less powerful and well-connected.

All you need to do is find a pretext for someone to be added to the foreign agent list, he explained – and that usually means either public visibility or criticism of the current authorities on any platform.

A lawyer who specialises in helping clients appeal against foreign agent designations told the BBC using fake information to discredit people was something they were seeing more often in their work.

“If a person…has no social media accounts or there is nothing in their social media that can be used to pin [foreign-agent status] on them, then they make up something so that they can say, ‘Well, look! Here it is!’” the lawyer said.

Any comment made to a foreign media outlet is considered sufficient grounds for someone to be designated a foreign agent, the lawyer explained. “It could be, say, Le Monde, or it could be something unknown.”

And reinforcing the theory that foreign agent designations were an instrument used by people with power and influence, the lawyer told the BBC that in their experience although the Ministry of Justice runs the process, the decisions are actually made much higher up.

“In court, Ministry of Justice employees tell us: listen, why are you picking on us? We are just technical executors – the people who search and decide are the ones upstairs,” they told the BBC.

When asked where the “signal” came from regarding a particular person, some Ministry of Justice employees “point their finger at the ceiling”, the lawyer added.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE INTERVIEWS THAT ‘NEVER HAPPENED’

Both Aleksei Shevtsov and Katerina Bosov maintain that the media interviews they believe were the reason for their foreign agent designations never actually happened.

In Shevstov’s case, the Brussels-based outlet EU Reporter, published two versions of an interview with him about the political situation in Russia. One was a text story, the other an audio recording. In both cases the stories were bylined as being from a “Guest Contributor - Opinion”.

The text version of the story was later translated and republished in a little-known Russian outlet Lenpravda, which specializes in anonymous texts and crime reporting.

This gave the story additional traction in Russia.

In the text interview, Shevtsov is quoted as criticizing the way traditional values are being promoted and used as an instrument of repression in Russia.

“If you do not share these official values, you are automatically branded an enemy,” he says.

In the audio recording, a voice introduced as Shevtsov speaks of the lack of respect for the law in Russia ‘at all levels’, and what he calls the “trend toward repression”. The speaker also denounces the war in Ukraine and predicts an imminent “revolution” in Russia.

The BBC asked three people who know Shevtsov well to read the story and listen to the voice recording:

“This is definitely not his voice,” said one, dismissing both the text and audio versions of the interview as “complete nonsense.”

Another acquaintance said he couldn’t imagine Shevtsov saying anything of the sort given his reputation as someone who was loyal to the authorities, had collected money for the ‘special military operation’ and had even renamed one of his restaurants in honour of the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In posts on his Telegram channel Shevtsov has denied emphatically that he ever gave an interview to EU Reporter, and what’s more says he had never even heard of the outlet.

He wrote that he suspected that his business rival Timerbulat Karimov may have been involved some way in placing the story, but did not offer any evidence. “I was told that the forces of evil do not shy away from anything,” he wrote. “Here is yet another confirmation.”

Timerbulat Karimov did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Shevtsov’s lawyer Konstantin Drachuk, told the BBC that his client had definitely been made a foreign agent on the basis of what he called a “fake” interview, but he declined to comment further.

On December 23, 2025, Anastasia Shevtsova posted on Telegram that she had sent a letter to the Justice Minister asking him to look into the situation.

“The purpose of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation cannot be to label an absolutely innocent person a foreign agent merely to intimidate and destroy him, on the basis of a false denunciation by people who have designs on his property,” she wrote.

CHAPTER 5: FACTBOX - WHO IS EU REPORTER?

According to its website, EU Reporter is “a Brussels-based European multimedia news platform, providing online news and video comment on EU and world affairs in all EU official languages”.

It claims to be read by “key decision-makers throughout Europe” and says it regularly publishes “exclusive interviews with leading European politicians and decision-makers, as well as opinion pieces by influential thinkers, experts and business people”.

A careful perusal of its terms and conditions reveals that it also publishes third party paid or placed material, but does not endorse or take responsibility for the editorial content. However it stipulates that it all third party content must be “legal, decent, truthful, honest, civil and tasteful”.

EU Reporter says that it adheres to the Irish Press Council’s Code of Conduct, which includes the principles of truth and accuracy, distinguishing fact and comment, and adhering to fair procedures and honesty.

The outlet is registered in the Republic of Ireland and run by former British TV journalist Colin Stevens, who is both publisher and editor-in-chief. It’s parent company is registered in the UK.

In 2021 Colin Stevens strongly denied accusations by the Politico news site that he was operating an under the radar lobbying campaign on behalf of high-profile foreign companies, publishing company press releases disguised as news stories. Stevens did acknowledge that he ran paid content and he pledged to make it clear in future publications about the source and authorship of published material.

The BBC asked EU Reporter to respond to the claim that it had published fabricated material about Aleksey Shevtsov.

In his reply, Colin Stevens said: “EU Reporter takes accuracy seriously and does not knowingly publish fabricated material”.

Mr Stevens replied that both pieces of content were submitted by “a contributor representing himself as Mr Shevtsov” and were published “in good faith, in his name, as guest contributor opinion content”. Mr Stevens said the pieces were “not paid placements” and that this was the standard byline for such material.

“At the time of publication we had no verified reason to believe the submissions were fraudulent,” he continued. “We note your comments that Mr Shevtsov and his representatives dispute authenticity. EU Reporter has not yet been provided with documentary evidence establishing fabrication, but we are reviewing the matter and would consider a formal right to reply or substantiated complaint supported by evidence.”

CHAPTER SIX: MORE FAKE STORIES AND MYSTERIOUS OUTLETS

Lawyers acting for Katerina Bosov have also said that interviews used as evidence against her, were fabricated.

In her case two outlets were involved. The first was the French-language news site Facta Media, and later a second story appeared in an equally little-known Ukrainian site called Kongres Svit.

Summaries of both stories were republished in Russia by a news site called Versiya under eye-catching headlines - “Katerina Bosov Has Paved Her Way to Foreign-Agent Status” and “The Coal Widow Becomes a Candidate for Foreign-Agent Status”.

The effect was immediate.

Oleg Matveychev, a member of the State Duma commission investigating cases of foreign interference, sent inquiries to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, and the Prosecutor General’s Office, asking them to examine the “scandalous statements” and to ascertain “if there are sufficient grounds,” to recognize Katerina Bosov as a foreign agent.

The Ministry agreed.

Katerina’s lawyers tried to challenge her foreign agent status in court, arguing it was made on the basis of a fake interview with Facta Media. Their case was rejected on the grounds that they had not ‘reliably proved’ that the interview was a fake, and that in any case it had been republished in Russia.

Bosov told the RBK business news site at the time that her team had tried to file a case against Facta Media in France but had been unable to establish whether the outlet “even really existed” as a legal entity.

On its website, Facta Media presents itself as an “international information agency” whose goal is to “restore France’s former influence in the global information space”.

The BBC notes that it has no connections to two similarly named companies Facta, a media and marketing company based in London - or Facta.eu, a not for profit media outlet based in Italy.

A cursory glance through its published stories shows hundreds of pieces about French politics and culture, interspersed with stories about corruption in Ukraine, and complimentary coverage of a range of characters from a Kazakh oligarch to political leaders in Russian occupied Donetsk and Lugansk.

However Facta Media is not listed in the register of French electronic media - which all news sites are required to do, it’s not clear who owns it, and it operates via a server located in Singapore.

The BBC has not been able to find any pages linked to Facta Media on any popular social networks. Its website does not list any staff, and it’s not clear if the individuals named as authors of individual stories are employees, or if they even exist at all.

A BBC reporter went to the Paris address listed on Facta’s website but could find no trace of the company. The security guard on duty at the building said he had never heard of Facta Media.

The fateful Facta interview with Katerina Bosov was bylined “Allyriane Collin”. There is no such staff member listed in the “About Us” section and the BBC has been unable to find any journalist working under that name on social media either.

The BBC asked Facta Media to respond to the claim that it had published a fabricated story about Katerina Bosov. It said Ms Bosov’s PR representatives had reached out to Facta Media via a Spanish English language newspaper and news site called TheOlivePress.es.

The publisher and editor of The Olive Press, Jon Clarke, told the BBC: “I don’t know who she is or indeed I can’t find any reference on our website.”

Facta Media said it had been provided with a full audio recording of the interview, “ with authentication of the respected Katerina Bosov’s voice” but provided no details of how the content was verified and who exactly provided it.

Facta Media also acknowledged that the name “Allyriane Collin” may have been a pseudonym.

“Our editorial team rarely publishes interviews,” Facta Media continued. “Even with the audio available, our trusted contact still reached out to Ekaterina Bosov to clarify some details of what she said. Ekaterina Bosov stated that she indeed considers Putin a war criminal and the attack on Ukraine as the greatest shame in Russian history. We did not clarify the other details of the audio recording. Now I regret that.”

Facta Media also said that they were willing to publish what they called “Ms Bosov’s new views” as a right to reply on their site. “We will charge exactly zero,” the site said.

Two weeks after the Facta Media ‘interview’ was published, another story about Katerina Bosov appeared, in Russian, on a news site called Kongres Svit in Ukraine.

It purported to be an interview with former Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. In it the former PM heaped praise on Katerina Bosov for her support for Ukraine, thanking her for selling coal for the war effort and calling for the assets of Russian state-owned companies abroad to be frozen and the money used to help the Ukrainian army.

The BBC asked Yatsenyuk’s press office for comment and the response was categorical.

“This publication is fake. Arseniy Yatsenyuk has never said anything like this.”

And what about the website that published the story?

The BBC has not been able to establish who owns Kongres Svit, but we have established some similarities with Facta Media.

The BBC discovered that the Kongres Svit domain was created in September 2019 and extended through 2026. The site was registered through the U.S.-based registrar NameCheap – interestingly, the same registrar used for Facta Media. And in fact the two sites look very similar.

Site traffic for Kongres Svit goes through a proxy in Iceland - which is also the case for Facta Media, and when BBC Russian analysts looked at the site’s code, they found a LiveInternet counter that leads to a Russian domain - counter.yadro.ru.

The BBC contacted Kongres Svit via the email address listed on their site. They replied in Ukrainian, using abusive language, and did not address any of our questions.

CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW TO PLACE A FAKE STORY

Although the BBC has not found evidence to establish who might have placed the stories which proved so damaging to Aleksey Shevtsov and Katerina Bosov, what happened to them both appears to be part of a wider pattern.

Sources in the Russian PR industry have told the BBC that requests to place ‘kompromat’ about a business rival are becoming increasingly common.

“[Clients tell us] there are people who are trying to sink them, and they need our help to sink them in return,” one insider said.

“You can push a competitor under sanctions or derail a deal,” another source said. “The main thing is that the outlet you need is at least somewhat searchable on Google, and then the [published] text can be thrown onto Russian resources.”

So how much does it cost to get damaging information about a rival published?

According to our sources a lot on the depends on what and where.

A standard placement on a Russian site costs upwards of 250k roubles (£2,400).

It will cost you up to 20 per cent more to get your damaging information on a well-known ‘dump site’ like Kompromat 2.

And if you want your story to be published outside Russia, then it’s going to cost you “at least three times as much”, one source said.

Two other PR insiders agreed, telling us prices ranged from upwards of 1000 Euros depending on the length of the piece and the website involved.

Hypothetical approach

In order to test out some of these claims, BBC Russian journalists approached two of the foreign outlets that have featured in this story - Facta Media and EU Reporter.

Posing as PR consultants acting for a large Russian enterprise, we asked about the possibility of publishing material in both outlets on a commercial basis.

Our approaches showed that both were open to placing third party content on a commercial basis, but both raised a number of caveats.

Facta Media replied that they were ready to consider the request but suggested a face to face meeting of video conference call with our ‘client’ at which they said lawyers would be present and legal documents would need to be signed.

They quoted a pricing structure in bitcoin, saying it would cost between 0.35 and 1 BTC (from 28,000 to 93,000 US dollars at the exchange rate at the time of publication) for what they called “a turnkey operation”.

The response to the BBC’s email to EU Reporter, was signed off by Colin Stevens. He said the outlet “would consider running story publications… about or on behalf of a leading Russian enterprise” but asked for more information.

In a follow up email Stevens said he would need guarantees that the subject of the story we were proposing to place had consented to the interview and that the answers “are truthful and honestly attributable”. “Our fee for such publication will be 5,000 euros, payable in advance,” Mr Stevens added.

The BBC then asked both Facta Media and EU reporter to confirm that the prices quoted in our hypothetical approach were correct and asked Facta Media why their pricing structure was quoted in bitcoins.

Facta Media did not comment directly on the prices mentioned but said cryptocurrency was widely used in France.

EU Reporter editor- in-chief Colin Stevens sent the BBC a copy of its price list and said that the cost of a standard single site paid placement was “500 Euros”.

“Any higher figure discussed in correspondence would related to a different service scope … and should not be described as our standard fee for publishing a story,” he said.

POSTSCRIPT

At the time of publication, the Russian Justice Ministry Foreign Agents register contains more than one thousand names. The vast majority are journalists and civil society activists. There are around a dozen are business people of which at least three claim they have been designated as the result of fabricated stories which appeared after business disputes.

Katerina Bosov continues to live in Italy, The Russian authorities have added her name to an international wanted list in connection with an unspecified criminal case.

Two years after Albert Avdolyan bought up Sibanthracite, the company was sold on to new owners.

Aleksey Shevtsov remains in Russia and is continuing court action to appeal against his foreign agent status.

The hotels, restaurants and tourism businesses he started up in Plyos have all been confiscated and taken over by the state.

In February 2026 his daughter Anastasia Shevtsova posted on her Telegram channel that an audio analysis of the recording of the alleged interview with her father posted by EU Reporter, had concluded it was not a human voice and was AI generated.

Following the BBC’s questions and Shevtsova’s post, EU Reporter updated their story to acknowledge that the veracity of the story had been challenged.

“We are reviewing the matter and will update accordingly,” it said.

Svyatoslav Khomenko also contributed to this story.

Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Jenny Norton.

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The US-Israeli war against Iran, although taking place far from Russia’s borders, has put Moscow in a difficult position.

On the one hand, the fighting in the Middle East is diverting Western countries’ attention and resources away from Ukraine. On the other hand, Vladimir Putin has lost an ally in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Despite reports that Russia is giving Iran intelligence to help it strike US targets, in public Putin has so far supported Tehran only with cautious statements, unwilling to directly antagonise Donald Trump.

The BBC investigates whether Russia could be a beneficiary of the war and how events in the Middle East could affect its standing on the world stage.

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‘Moscow proves powerless’

“As for Iran, we have a purely allied relationship,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the BRICS summit in October 2024. That same year Tehran officially joined the bloc of major emerging economies, which Russia had long presented as an alternative to Western alliances.

A few months later, Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian ceremonially signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” agreement in the Kremlin.

In the West, the growing ties between the two countries—particularly their military cooperation—were viewed with increasing alarm. Western politicians increasingly referred to the Moscow-Tehran alliance as a new “axis of evil”.

But the partnership proved insufficient for Moscow to help Iran at a critical moment. When Israel and the United States struck Iranian military targets last summer—in the conflict now known as the 12-Day War—Russia limited itself to rhetorical support for Tehran.

Much the same appears to have happened this time. After the outbreak of the large-scale war in the Middle East on 28 February, the Kremlin sharply condemned the actions of the US and Israel.

Vladimir Putin criticised the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but in an official statement he did not directly name those responsible.

At the end of last week, US officials told The Washington Post that Moscow was sharing intelligence with Tehran in order to help it attack American forces in the region, though the newspaper added that “the extent of Russia’s targeting assistance…was not entirely clear”. The Kremlin declined to comment.

Russia’s restrained response to its ally’s troubles has a broader context.

In December 2024, Moscow also stood by as Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was overthrown. Only a few months ago, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, a long-time ally of Moscow, was captured by US forces and taken to the United States. All this has prompted commentators and observers to reconsider the value of a partnership with Russia.

Since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has spoken of creating a new world order and has sought to strengthen its influence in the Global South, said Ruslan Suleymanov, an expert on the Middle East at the London- and Washington-based NEST Centre. The thinktank has been designated a foreign agent in Russia.

In these circumstances, what happened first in Venezuela and then in Iran can be seen as a blow to the Kremlin’s ideology, Suleymanov said.

“Moscow rhetorically presents itself as a patron of the countries of the Global South, but in reality it proves powerless against the ‘damned West’, represented by the Americans, who can kidnap leaders [friendly to the Kremlin] and even assassinate them.”

According to Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasia programme at the US-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the events in Iran do, in one sense, cast Russia in an unfavourable light.

“Russia wasn’t able to deter this war. Trump just proceeds as he pleases. I do think that that makes Russia look impotent to some extent,” she said.

But Notte does not believe that this is likely to cause serious damage to Russia’s reputation among its partners.

“Russia is perceived in much of what we call the Global South, or the non-Western world, as not just fighting Ukraine, but fighting the collective West [...] What that results in, I think, is a more forgiving judgment of Russia where others understand that, of course, Russian bandwidth is constrained.”

Notte also suggested that countries that have relied on Russia’s military support—such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in Africa—often have no alternative.

She said: “Will [these countries] now turn away from Russia? I don’t think so. But at the same time, everyone, I think, understands that Russia is not going to be your knight in shining armour either, when push comes to shove.”

Russia, despite criticising attacks on Iran and cooperating with Tehran in the military-industrial sphere, never promised to enter a war on Iran’s side. The strategic partnership treaty itself contains no provisions for mutual defence.

“The only commitment is not to side with the enemy in the event of war,” said Suleymanov of the NEST Centre. “Of course, that is not a military alliance. It is very different from what we see, for example, between Russia and North Korea.”

A ‘situational partnership’ with Iran

Before the February attack on Iran, and subsequent reports of intelligence sharing, media and analysts noted that Russia had been increasing military supplies to Tehran. Iran received combat trainer aircraft, armoured vehicles, attack helicopters and even some smaller air defence systems.

Some of these weapons, along with internet technologies supplied by Russia, were used by the authorities to brutally suppress large-scale protests in January, during which thousands of Iranians were killed.

The two countries also cooperated in space and nuclear technology. Russia was building a nuclear power plant in Iran. Iranian nuclear scientists meanwhile secretly travelled to Moscow, according to the Financial Times.

At the same time, Notte said it was important to remember that Iran had reportedly requested weapons from Russia that would allow it to defend itself more effectively—but had not received them.

She said: “Some of the capabilities that the Iranians have reportedly asked for for a long time and that would have enabled Iran to better defend itself or deter this kind of war, like advanced air defences or like advanced fighter aircraft, the SU-35… this has been a perennial issue in Russia-Iran relations. We never saw Russia delivering those kinds of capabilities.”

Nicole Grajewski, an associate professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po University and an expert on Russia-Iran relations, told the BBC: “Everyone overestimated the Russia-Iran defense relationship. Or I guess kind of misunderstood the fact that you can deliver armaments to a country and not be obliged to go fight a war for them.”

And there are other tensions in the relationship between the two countries, said Suleymanov.

For example, Russia did not support Iran in its territorial dispute with the United Arab Emirates. Tehran and Abu Dhabi have argued for years over the ownership of islands in the Persian Gulf, which are formally controlled by Iran. Russia called for a “diplomatic solution to the conflict”, angering Tehran.

Iran, for its part, has made statements supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. For that reason, military and economic cooperation between Russia and Iran should be seen as a “situational partnership”, Suleymanov said.

According to Reuters, during last summer’s 12-day war Iranian authorities were “unimpressed” by the level of Russian support.

BBC sources cite one of the main reasons for Russia’s non-intervention in Iran as a reluctance to damage relations with the far more important trading partners among the Gulf monarchies, which are themselves under Iranian attack.

Russia also does not want to damage its relationship with US President Donald Trump.

The need to choose sides places the Kremlin in an “uncomfortable situation”, said Suleymanov.

Kremlin’s focus on Ukraine

Supporting Tehran would put the Kremlin in direct conflict with Washington, which Moscow is trying to influence in negotiations over the invasion of Ukraine.

For several months the Trump administration has been acting as a mediator between the Kremlin and Kyiv. Despite little progress so far, Vladimir Putin has pointedly refrained from harsh criticism of Trump or the United States—that role has been left to the Foreign Ministry and lower-level officials.

According to experts interviewed by the BBC, the war in Iran and the assassination of its leader will likely delay the end of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as it will deepen the Kremlin’s mistrust of the West.

“This completely validates everything that the Russians have been concerned about since the colour revolutions and the war in Iraq,” said Grajewski of Sciences Po University.

US intervention in Iran was refuelling fears of “this kind of Western-led external efforts at regime change,” she added.

But at the same time, according to Notte of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, it is important for Putin to at least preserve the image of an “amicable” relationship with Trump, so as to avoid blowback in the US leader’s approach to Moscow. That could be a difficult balance to strike in the long term, she said.

“The more Trump continues like this, the harder this balancing act will become for Russia. Let’s imagine that in three months’ time, the US invades Cuba. You know, we have another Russian ally coming under pressure. the more Trump goes in this direction, the more difficult this kind of balancing act becomes,.”

Despite these difficulties, Notte and other experts interviewed by the BBC acknowledge that in some respects the conflict in the Middle East may benefit Moscow, which is primarily focused on its own war.

According to Notte, one key factor is rising oil prices, which could provide relief for the Russian budget. There are also concerns about disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied gas exports from the Gulf pass.

BBC News Russian has investigated how disruptions to the oil market caused by the war could benefit Moscow. Not only would higher oil prices increase Russian revenues, but supply disruptions could also allow Russia to capture part of the Gulf states’ share of exports to China and India.

Another factor is the military resources the United States must devote to the operation against Iran, which US officials say will last at least several more weeks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated directly that if the war in the Middle East drags on it could affect arms supplies to Ukraine.

Amid the crisis in the Middle East, it will become even more important for Russia to achieve its objectives in Ukraine, Notte predicts. The outcome of that war could deliver the “ultimate verdict on Russia’s power in the world”.

Notte added that, if Russia currently appears impotent in the Middle East, it is because so much of its resources are focused on Ukraine.

“If you are looking from Moscow, you will say: We must come out on top in Ukraine, because otherwise, why did we pay all these costs? Why did we retreat from other regions? [...] We cannot lose this war because then our power projection will be even further weakened.”

English updated version edited by Theo Merz.

Read this story in Russian here.

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With the UK allowing Washington to use its air bases for “defensive” strikes during the US-Israel war with Iran, attention has focused on what support Tehran might receive from abroad.

Russia and China both have strong diplomatic, trade and military links to the Islamic Republic, but the current conflict will bring into focus just how far they are willing to back it.

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Loud but limited support from Russia

Moscow’s response to the joint US–Israeli strikes on Iran has been loud, but limited, signalling anger and solidarity with Tehran, while carefully avoiding steps that would draw Russia directly into the confrontation.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke of the “deep disappointment” that, despite talks between Washington and Tehran, the situation had “degraded into outright aggression”.

Moscow, he said, was in constant contact with Iran’s leadership and with the Gulf states affected by the escalation.

The Russian foreign ministry has condemned what it called “unprovoked aggression” against Iran by the US and Israel and denounced what it views to be political assassinations and the “hunt” for leaders of sovereign states.

On Sunday, President Vladimir Putin sent condolences to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian over the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling it a “cynical violation of human morality and international law”.

Yet the Kremlin has notably avoided personal criticism of US President Donald Trump and is still expressing gratitude for American mediation efforts over Ukraine.

Asked on Monday how Moscow could now trust Washington, Peskov replied that Russia “first and foremost trusts only itself” and defends its own interests.

Those interests help explain why Russia’s support for Iran remains largely rhetorical even though Tehran has become one of Moscow’s closest allies since the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, supplying drones and helping Russia develop ways to evade Western sanctions.

Iran also fits the Kremlin’s vision of a multipolar order, in which state rights are more important than human rights, and governments exercise sweeping control at home. The fall of such a regime would be a blow to that model.

At the same time, the Kremlin has shown before that it will not risk too much for its partners, whether it be in Venezuela, in Syria or during the 12‑day war between Israel and Iran in the summer of 2025.

Russia is heavily engaged in Ukraine and appears unwilling – and perhaps unable – to offer more than diplomatic backing and military‑technical co-operation.

The Russian-Iranian strategic partnership treaty signed on 17 January 2025 stops short of being a mutual defence pact.

Moscow and Tehran pledged to share information, hold joint exercises and “ensure regional security”, but they did not promise to defend one another if attacked. Economic ties between the two countries are also modest, and trade remains in the $4bn–$5bn range.

But military and industrial links are growing. In February, the Financial Times newspaper reported a major deal under which Russia would supply Iran with Verba man-portable air defence systems worth €500m.

Iran has received Yak‑130 training aircraft, Mi‑28 attack helicopters and is expecting Su‑35 fighters, though Russia is yet to supply the Verba systems.

The use of Iranian-made Shahed drones significantly changed the tactics of Russian forces on the Ukrainian front. But last year, Moscow rapidly expanded its own drone production, reducing its dependence on Iranian weapons.

For Moscow, Iran is too important to be allowed to fall – but not important enough to fight for. That calculation could change, but for now Russia’s intervention is likely to remain largely confined to words.

China’s role as an economic lifeline

China has strongly condemned the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Beijing has historically opposed US strategies of regime change around the world.

At the heart of the China-Iran bond is a mutually beneficial economic partnership. China is Iran’s largest trading partner and its most important energy customer.

Despite years of punishing US sanctions on Iran, Beijing has remained Tehran’s economic lifeline, purchasing large quantities of its oil at a discounted prices through a network of so-called “ghost fleets” – falsely registered ships that avoid sanctions to transport oil.

In 2025, for example, China bought more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, and the revenues earned from Chinese purchases have helped Iran stabilise its economy and fund defence spending even as Western markets closed off.

A 25-year strategic agreement signed in 2021 solidified the relationship, promising hundreds of billions in Chinese investment in Iranian infrastructure and telecommunications.

China’s ‘long game’

Historically, China’s approach to Iran-Israel and Iran-US tensions has been one of strategic hedging.

During previous escalations, including the 12-day Israel-Iran war in the summer of 2025, China consistently called for “restraint” while blaming “external interference” – a not-so-thinly veiled reference to US policy.

In previous clashes between Iran and Israel, China acted as a diplomatic shield for Tehran, using its veto power – or the threat of using it – to water down UN resolutions. However, China has never offered direct military intervention.

Beijing’s strategy has always been to keep the US bogged down in the Middle East without triggering a total regional collapse that would spike global oil prices.

A pro-Western regime in Tehran would be a catastrophic geopolitical defeat for China, as Tehran not only provides energy but also politically represents a sizeable counterweight to US influence in the region.

Iran is a member of Brics and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, and serves as a key geographical connector linking Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

A collapse of the Islamic Republic could weaken the credibility of the multilateral mechanisms that Moscow and Beijing have been trying to strengthen.

Without a full US-Israeli invasion of Iran, the political and military structures there may well remain.

Beijing will play its usual “long game”, intending to make good with whoever is going to take over Khamenei’s position as leader of Iran, while Russia will look for opportunities of its own.

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In the fishing village of Sedanka, in Russia’s Far East, life is hard.

Most homes lack basic amenities such as running water, indoor toilets and central heating, despite temperatures routinely reaching -10C (14F) or colder in winter months.

Ringed by forest-tundra and bogs, its district centre can only be reached from May to October by river boat or vehicles with tracks. In winter, only by snowmobile or helicopter.

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There are few local jobs and most villagers survive by fishing and growing their own food.

And rubbish dumps draw in dangerous visitors - Kamchatka brown bears, which are among the largest in the world.

Yet Sedanka has a more recent challenge to contend with.

Almost all of its men aged 18 to 55 have left the village, according to locals, having joined Russia’s war in Ukraine.

‘There is no-one to chop fire wood’

“It’s heartbreaking - so many of our people have been killed,” says Natalia, a villager whose name we’ve changed for her security, in an interview with the BBC World Service.

“My sister’s husband and my cousins are at the front.

“In almost every family, someone is fighting.”

Located on the north-west edge of the Kamchatka Peninsula, near the Sea of Okhotsk, Sedanka is more than 4,300 miles (7,000km) away from Ukraine’s front lines.

The American city of Anchorage, across the ocean, is roughly half that distance.

Thirty-nine men from the village signed contracts with Russia to fight in the war from a total population of 258.

Of these, 12 have been killed and another seven are missing.

“All our men have left for the special military operation,” a group of women told the regional governor when he visited in March 2024, using the Kremlin’s language for its war in Ukraine.

“There is no-one to chop firewood for winter to heat our stoves,” they added in an exchange shown on state TV.

The BBC, along with Russian news outlet Medizona and volunteer researchers, has so far verified that 40,201 Russian soldiers were killed in 2025.

According to our analysis, we estimate that the total number killed in 2025 will reach 80,000, which would be the most deadly year for Russian losses in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion was launched on 24 February 2022.

This calculation takes into account obituaries which cite 2025 as the year of death or burial, but we have not yet fully processed or cross-checked.

Confirmed deaths for 2024 now stand at 69,362 - roughly comparable to the combined totals for 2022 and 2023 - and the curve has steepened since late 2024.

We have confirmed the deaths using official reports and probatе data registry - an official registry of cases after someone dies - as well as newspaper articles, social media posts from relatives or close friends and data from new memorials and graves.

In total, the BBC has now identified the names of 186,102 Russian soldiers killed in the war.

However, the true death toll is generally accepted to be much higher, as many deaths on the battlefield are not recorded.

Military experts believe our analysis might represent 45-65% of the total, putting the potential number of Russian deaths at between 286,000 and 413,500.

Ukraine has also sustained heavy losses.

Last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky told the French broadcaster France 2 that “officially” 55,000 Ukrainians had been killed on the battlefield.

In addition, a “large number of people” are considered officially missing, he said, though he did not give an exact figure.

Based on estimates from sources including the UA Losses website, which the BBC has cross-referenced, we estimate that the number of Ukrainians killed is as high as 200,000.

Most Russians killed in the war have Slavic surnames.

But on a per-capita basis, losses are disproportionately high among small indigenous groups, especially in economically depressed areas of Siberia and the Far East, such as Sedanka.

Sedanka is home mainly to Koryaks and Itelmens - indigenous groups who, under wartime rules, can be exempted from mobilisation.

Anti-war activist Maria Vyushkova says Russian state TV amplifies stereotypes about indigenous communities being “born warriors” and skilled shooters in order to encourage them to join the war.

“Many indigenous communities take pride in that heritage as part of their identity. The Kremlin uses this pride to recruit for war,” Vyushkova says.

One of the men from Sedanka who joined the conflict was Vladimir Akeev, 45, a hunter and fisherman, who signed a contract with the army in the summer of 2024.

Four months later he was killed in combat.

Mourners at his funeral in November 2024 were only able to reach the cemetery by snowmobile.

Akeev’s coffin was taken there on wide wooden sleds.

Elsewhere, confirmed losses from indigenous groups include 201 Nenets, 96 Chukchi, 77 Khanty, 30 Koryaks and seven Inuit.

As a proportion of males between the ages of 18 and 60, this equates to an estimated 2% of Chukchi, 1.4% of Russian Inuits, 1.32% of Koryaks and 0.8% of Khanty.

The BBC’s analysis shows that 67% of the dead are from rural areas and small towns - classed as those with populations under 100,000 people - even though 48% of Russia’s population lives there.

The loss rate was smallest in major cities, with Moscow having the least deaths per capita - five people for every 10,000 males, or 0.05%.

In poorer regions, such as Buryatia, in eastern Siberia, and Tuva, in southern Siberia, the death rate is between 27 and 33 times higher respectively than in the capital.

The main driver of this gap between cities and rural areas is the difference in economic development, pay and education, says demographer Alexey Raksha.

As a result, soldiers from poorer regions and ethnic minorities make up a larger share of the army and of the dead than the overall population, he says.

Regions with a high share of losses had lower life expectancy even before their men joined the war, another Russian demographer told the BBC.

“For many, the driver is not only poverty but a lack of prospects - the feeling that there is nothing to lose,” he says.

In Sedanka, a monument to “participants of the special military operation” was unveiled in autumn 2024.

Last year, the regional government pledged to bestow the honorary title of “village of military valour” for the participation of its men in the war.

It also promised a support programme for families of Sedanka’s soldiers.

Yet the village has still not received its honorary title nor has much of the promised support for soldiers’ families arrived.

Roofs on the homes of four contract soldiers were fixed after falling into disrepair, but only after significant media attention.

One in five houses, built during Soviet times, has been deemed by the state to be unsafe.

Its sole school has been classed by officials as being in a state of emergency, with some walls at risk of collapsing.

All of this has been compounded by the loss of the village’s working-age men to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Additional reporting by Yaroslava Kiryukhina and Natalia Maca Groca.

This story was published on BBC News Online.

“Life is becoming more expensive,” complains Alexander, a Moscow-based advertising specialist who works for a big corporation.

In the course of one month his monthly food budget soared by more than 22% - from 35,000 roubles (£330; $450) to 43,000 (£406; $555).

With Russia’s economy hanging somewhere between stagnation and decline, ordinary Russians have begun to feel the pinch from the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, as it approaches its fourth anniversary.

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The cost of almost all essentials has gone up in local supermarkets, from eggs and chicken fillets to seasonal vegetables, Alexander has noticed. We have changed the names of everyone we have spoken to for this piece.

Even his daily treat on the way to work - an Americano from a local cafe - has suddenly surged 26% from 230 to 290 roubles.

Prices have risen steadily in Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, driven by a federal budget dominated by the war effort and defence industry.

This in turn has led to rapid economic growth and raised living standards across the country.

Until now, high levels of inflation have gone largely unnoticed by the general population, especially in the big cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg. Big spending masked the mounting economic consequences of the war, as well as Western sanctions and the exodus of foreign investment from Russia.

That rapid economic growth slowed sharply in 2025, and as salaries could no longer keep up with inflation, rising prices started to hit people’s pockets.

Then at the start of 2026, supermarket prices jumped by a sharp 2.3% in less than a month, according to data from Russia’s statistics service Rosstat.

Everything became more expensive at the start of the year: meat, milk, salt, flour, potatoes, pasta, bananas, soap, toothpaste, socks, laundry detergent, and many medicines too.

Average food basket

Every other January since 2019, the BBC has bought the same selection of 59 basic goods from the same supermarket chain, Pyaterochka, in Moscow. The basket includes vegetables and fruits, dairy and meat products, canned goods and instant noodles, sweets and beverages, including beer.

In 2024, the basket cost 7,358 roubles (£63; $83). Last month, it cost 8,724 (£83; $112) roubles - an increase of 18.6%.

That tallies with Rosstat’s own 18.1% measure of overall accumulated food inflation from January 2024 to the end of January 2026.

One of the most noticeable price increases in our basket has been a hike of almost 15% in the cost of fruit and vegetables since 2024.

Russia relies on imported fruit and vegetables, so store prices are highly sensitive to fluctuations in the rouble exchange rate and disruptions in the supply chain. Both occurred after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, the price of dairy products - which tend to be locally produced - has soared 41%, the biggest rise in our sample basket in the last two years. This is because Russia’s dairy industry has been hit by rising farm costs, expensive loans and staff shortages.

Rising taxes and changing habits

The most recent factor influencing price rises is a two-point increase in VAT from 20% to 22% since 1 January.

The sales tax hike is directly related to the war in Ukraine, as Russia’s finance ministry said it was needed to finance the country’s “defence and security”.

While Alexander from Moscow told the BBC he was not going to change his eating habits, others say rising food prices have hit their diets and family budgets significantly.

Nadezhda, 68, says she can no longer afford to buy beef and has resorted to cheap varieties of fish.

She and her husband, who are both retired, live in Moscow on their state pensions and his additional income. Nadezhda says her entire monthly pension of almost 32,000 roubles (£302; $413) now goes on food.

That means other expenses have been put on hold.

They had been saving to fix their car, but recently had to rely on savings to pay for food. Similarly, buying a new winter jacket for Nadezhda’s husband, which would have cost about 17,000 roubles (£160; $220), will have to wait until next year.

Kristina, a Moscow marketing specialist in her mid-40s, also had dig into her savings to buy food last month. She lives with her husband, who is a personal trainer, and says she has started paying attention to discounts and has noticed others in supermarkets doing so as well.

“Now I take a very pragmatic approach: not what I want or don’t want to eat, but how much protein is in 100 grams of this product,” Kristina says.

She and her husband can no longer afford to eat out, but even when cooking at home, the price of a dinner for two has more than doubled - from around 1,000 roubles (£9.46; $12.92) to more than 2,000 roubles (£18.91; $25.85).

In summer 2025, Russia’s Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said that the economy was close to a “scenario of balanced rates of economic growth”.

However, some economists suggest that after slowing down significantly last year, the Russian economy is now at risk of going into the red.

One of the main risks this year will come from the oil market.

The federal budget is based on a high oil price, but market rates have fallen since the start of this year and there is no expectation of any imminent rise.

Russian oil sales have also been hit by latest US sanctions that have cut off supplies to one of Moscow’s main trading partners, India.

As a result, Russian authorities are likely to face a bigger budget deficit than they had planned.

Borrowing is difficult due to high interest rates - few are willing to lend to a country currently waging war and with a reputation for being unreliable.

That could mean further unpopular measures - either further tax rises, which would hurt people and businesses, or cutting budget spending, primarily in the public sector. That would slow down the economy and bring down household incomes further.

“Overall, there is a trend towards stagnation and a possible decline in GDP,” Tatiana Mikhailova, an economist and visiting assistant professor at Penn State University, told the BBC.

For the moment nothing indicates the economy is in decline, but she believes there is a high likelihood of it happening.

“Every time oil prices fall, a recession is possible in Russia,” she says, even if she believes the economy can carry on without growth for some time.

That may be of little comfort to ordinary Russians, who will still feel the effects in their pockets.

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This story was published on BBC News Online.

Kyiv and the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX recently reached an agreement to shut down Starlink terminals unofficially operating in Ukraine. The move was designed to hit the Russian army’s combat capabilities, but it has also adversely affected some parts of the Ukrainian military. The BBC explains how.

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SpaceX satellite communications have been vital to both the Ukrainian and Russian military forces for much of Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Soon after that invasion began in February 2022, Kyiv negotiated with Elon Musk for the transfer of the first SpaceX-provided Starlink terminals.

These battlefield satellite connections allowed military personnel - as well as government and local officials - to quickly and conveniently exchange information and therefore coordinate operations. The service also helped Kyiv increase the effectiveness of its air and sea drones.

This was a significant boost to Ukraine’s armed forces, despite Musk’s personal decision to prevent Starlink being used off the coast of Crimea. The satellite system remains the main communications infrastructure for the Ukrainian army.

But from the second half of 2023, Starlink terminals began to be used by Russian forces. As Starlink does not operate in Russia and citizens of the country are officially prohibited from using the service, it is clear that these are “grey” or unofficial terminals that are purchased or smuggled in from third countries.

Russian military personnel made no secret of the fact that they were using these systems via hacked or illegally registered accounts.

As far back as early 2024, Mykhailo Fedorov, then the Minister of Digital Transformation, spoke about finding a solution that would deactivate these Russian terminals.

“We found a procedure, proposed it to SpaceX, and are currently discussing how to prevent such cases from happening,” he said in an interview with the Ukrainian outlet Suspilne at that time.

But it took almost two years for this solution to be implemented.

When the Russian army began installing Starlink on its drones and attacking military and civilian targets behind Ukrainian lines, it was the last straw.

The procedure Fedorov described involves verifying all the hundreds of thousands of Starlink terminals that were being used by the Ukrainian army, creating a so-called “white list”. Any terminals operating unofficially, or on a “grey list” on the territory would be shut down.

‘Musk flipped the switch’

Fedorov, now Ukraine’s defence minister, announced the start of this “white list” verification on 2 February.

“Soon, only verified and registered terminals will operate in Ukraine. Everything else will be shut down,” the minister said. He added that the verification process would be “as simple as possible”.

At first, designated personnel were required to submit unique reference numbers associated with the terminal through an army system. But soon after the start of the verification process, this was simplified to allow any military staff using the terminal to register the Starlink equipment.

Civilians using the terminals need to provide additional information for their equipment to be added to the white list.

Three days after the start of verification, Fedorov said that “whitelisted Starlinks are working” while “Russian terminals have already been blocked”.

Dozens of reports of Starlink “downing” have appeared on Russian social media and pro-military Telegram channels.

“The Americans’ shutdown of Starlink terminals used by the Russian Armed Forces has negatively impacted communications in our units. Troops are urgently setting up backup communications methods, albeit ones that are less convenient,” wrote the military-focused Telegram channel “Two Majors”, which has 1.2 million subscribers.

The pro-invasion Russian blogger Yuri Podolyaka, who has 2.9 million subscribers, described the situation in Russian military units without satellite communications as “chaos.”

“What everyone feared for so long, but secretly hoped wouldn’t happen until the end of the special military operation, has happened. Elon Musk flipped the switch, and 80% of Starlink terminals on the front line went down. And there’s a high probability that on our side, this will soon reach 100%, and only Russian ingenuity will be able to try to circumvent it,” he wrote on Telegram on February 5.

Ukrainian sources also have also reported significant disruption in Russian units without Starlink.

Serhii Beskrestnov, an advisor to the defence minister, said that the Russian army had been forced to stop some assault operations.

“The enemy isn’t facing a problem on the front lines - it’s facing a catastrophe. All troop command and control has been disrupted. Assault operations have been halted in many areas,” he said.

Figures from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine indicate a decrease in the number of military operations on the front since February 2, the day SpaceX began shutting down “grey” terminals.

While 338 armed clashes were recorded on January 31, and 179 on February 1, this figure dropped by 15–20% in the following days. For example, there were 133 clashes on February 4th.

A BBC source in the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces confirmed reports of communications problems in the Russian army.

The Starlink outage has “significantly” impacted Russian military coordination, and the enemy army is trying to find a replacement, the source said.

This task is complicated by the fact that no direct equivalent exists.

Russia’s answer to Starlink delayed

Judging by the initial reactions to SpaceX’s shutdown of unverified Starlink terminals, Russian military personnel in Ukraine have been using them much more actively than previously assumed.

There are alternatives to Starlink, but they are not as affordable or reliable.

For short-range communications - up to a few dozen kilometres - Wi-Fi-based or other types of radio can be used.

Russia also has its own satellite communications network: Gazprom Space Systems. This is already used in combat, but to a limited extent.

Gazprom Space Systems has only five communications satellites in orbit - significantly fewer than Starlink. This means limited coverage and often weak signal. The system is also expensive, difficult to maintain, and requires precise positioning, which is not always possible in the field.

Moscow has another project to create its own low-orbit satellite communications constellation, which is being carried out by the private company Bureau 1440 with the support of national space agency Roscosmos.

The ambitious project - which initially expected to see 900 satellites in orbit by 2023 - was scheduled to see its first launches in December 2025.

But these launches were delayed, for reasons that were not officially announced. Russian media said that problems in the satellites’ production may have pushed back the start of the project.

Blowback for Ukraine

The “downing” of unverified Starlink terminals also affected the Ukrainian army. Thousands of users were left without communication, including during combat operations or drone control.

“My Starlinks still haven’t been approved, even though I submitted the application a long time ago,” Roman, a Ukrainian Armed Forces soldier fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region, told the BBC’s Ukrainian Service.

Several of his comrades are in the same situation. To carry out urgent combat missions, they have to “rent” approved terminals for hours at a time from other units.

Former MP and current anti-tank guided missile platoon commander Tetyana Chornovol also drew attention to the problem.

“The shutdown left my two pilot combat positions without communication,” she said.

According to her, the Starlink terminals failed to work, even though the necessary data for inclusion on the “white list” was submitted in advance.

The defence ministry said delays in verification were caused by the volume of data being submitted to SpaceX, combined with processing times at the company.

In addition to this, some Starlink terminals were given to soldiers by volunteers, friends, or relatives. This means they are not officially registered with the military unit.

Individuals are afraid that command will take them away if the terminals are verified.

The Ukrainian defence ministry has promised not to confiscate these devices or force military personnel to register their Starlink devices with the army - just with SpaceX.

“I promise you that this data is only needed for the register of terminals that will operate in the country. No one will subsequently take Starlink from you,” said ministerial advisor Beskrestnov.

In any case, the verification process is gaining momentum, and Kyiv has promised that all Ukrainian-owned Starlink terminals will soon return to service.

The “Russian” ones, however, will remain deactivated. And the Kremlin will have to urgently figure out how to solve this problem.

Read this story in Russian here.

English version edited by Theo Merz.

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Reporting from Astana.

Yevgeny Korobov, a former officer of the Russian army, stands in the middle of the room dressed casually in a black shirt and light pants. The 30-year-old has been living in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, for almost three years.

He says that during this time seven or eight other deserters have stayed in his apartment.

“I try as best I can to help people like me. You don’t need to pay me, just live here, that’s all,” he says. “Who else will help them? After all, there is something that binds us. We are all deserters. We all ran.”

Just four years previously, Korobov was fighting in Ukraine from February to May 2022.

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‘The war has begun’

Korobov had always wanted to be in the military, although his parents were postal workers. He studied at a military college in his native Krasnoyarsk, before joining the Russian army as “a young officer full of enthusiasm to serve”. His contract was to last until 2023.

His enthusiasm soon soured, however.

“During service in the army you encounter injustice and madness, and you begin to become completely disillusioned with everything, with how things are in Russia,” he says.

In early 2022, Korobov was sent to military exercises in the Kursk region, near the Ukrainian border. “I didn’t believe there would be a war, but we went there with anxiety,” he recalls.

He describes what he saw after crossing the border into Ukraine: “We drove through populated areas. People were living their lives, Someone was refuelling a car, someone was drinking coffee, someone smoking. And we’re driving. The war has begun.”

His brigade moved towards the capital Kyiv, stopping in the Brovary district east of the city.

This is the area where the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office says that Russian soldiers had carried out war crimes. The outlets Meduza and Radio Liberty investigations allege that soldiers of the 15th Brigade, where Korobov was based, had set up a torture chamber in a post office in the Kyiv region. Journalists also reported on the execution of at least five civilians by the same brigade.

Korobov claims that he personally did not witness war crimes, but heard about them from others. He says that his job was to escort rear columns, navigation and route reconnaissance during the war, and that therefore he was constantly on the move.

His brigade was near Kyiv until the end of March, after which he left the region when Russian forces retreated following the failed attempt to encircle the Ukrainian capital. As he retreated, Korobov saw destroyed Ukrainian towns. He says this caused him “horror and disappointment”.

Korobov says that the columns ran into ambushes by several Ukrainian forces.

“We had to fire back,” he recalls. “What else could we do? Die? Am I a good person if I died? I also wanted to live and wanted all my soldiers to return. What were we fighting for? For our lives. The Ukrainians had an enemy — us. We had two enemies — the Ukrainians and our own commanders.”

The ‘war hero’

At the end of 2022, just before he finally deserted and left Russia for Kazakhstan, Korobov was ordered by his commander in Moscow to appear on Russian television.

The show painted him as a war hero who had been injured in battle.

“Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Korobov, together with his group, was escorting a rear column,” said the host of a popular evening talk show on Channel One. “They ran into an ambush. They fought superior enemy forces. They destroyed at least 15 militants and enemy equipment. They themselves had no losses.”

Korobov calls the story, first reported by the Russian defence ministry, fabricated. He says his unit did run into an ambush at the beginning of March 2022 in the Chernihiv region, but that the extent of the ordeal was greatly exaggerated.

“Fell into an ambush — yes. ‘Carefully prepared’ — hardly. Whether the enemy’s numbers were superior, I don’t know how many people were there or who was firing,” retorts Korobov.

After appearing in the media, he received a medal for courage for which Korobov says he “couldn’t care less”. “For an invented feat? For a war I didn’t want to take part in? I already didn’t want to serve in the army at all — I was just enduring until my contract ended.”

What Korobov does not dispute is that he was injured in Ukraine. During the course of the television interview, he is noticeably limping.

‘No way back’

Korobov was wounded in the leg in Donetsk in May 2022 after which he was evacuated and returned to Russia.

At the time, the command was issued to assault the village of Ozerne, near Lyman. “Only once were we able to get close to it; we were hit with everything possible, and during all the following assaults we couldn’t even approach,” says Korobov.

“At that point I already understood that there was no chance we would be allowed to go home. And that the only way to leave there was as dead or wounded.”

One day, their unit accidentally landed a drone on Ukrainian positions. Korobov says his unit of four people was sent to retrieve it and told by his commanding officer not to return without it — a mission that he describes as impossible.

“I understood that that was it, there was no way back,” he says. “And I opened fire on my own soldiers. I fired a burst into the ground. I wounded my guys. Then I wounded myself, shot myself. I provided first aid, and we crawled towards evacuation.”

This suggests that the injury that was reported and celebrated on the television program Let Them Talk was one Korobov inflicted on himself.

The BBC cannot independently verify Korobov’s account, although he provided photographs of his wounded leg.

Korobov and the remnants of his platoon were then evacuated from the frontline. He spent a month and a half in a hospital, then underwent rehabilitation.

Korobov wanted to serve out his contract in Russia until 2023, without returning to Ukraine. However, after the announcement of further mobilisation in September 2022, all contracts became indefinite. At the end of that year, he was informed that he would be sent back to Ukraine.

Looking for asylum

Korobov says that before leaving Russia he contacted the Go By The Forest project, which helps former Russian soldiers like himself who fear returning to the war in Ukraine. Activists then drew up a route for him to escape to Kazakhstan.

Soon he had packed a bag and left Russia.

A criminal case for desertion has since been opened against Korobov, and he faces up to 15 years in prison. Because of this, for the first months of life in Astana he hardly left the house.

Later, he found a job at a bar — illegally, because, as an asylum-seeker, he wasn’t permitted to work there.

“Kazakhstan has not granted asylum to a single Russian citizen yet, and I think it won’t,” says Korobov.

“We are waiting for a decision from European countries, especially from France, because at the moment it is the only country that has accepted Russian deserters,” he says.

Korobov understands the reluctance of Western countries to accept Russian deserters, but believes that this is one of the “effective ways of resolving the conflict: not only supplying weapons and imposing sanctions, but also giving Russians the opportunity to refuse to carry weapons, to refuse to fight.”

The BBC spoke to Artur Alkhastov, a lawyer from the Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights, who has been helping Russian deserters who fled to the country during the past three years. Part of the process is to verify the former soldiers, in order to prevent agents of the Russian security services from infiltrating the group.

He says verifying Korobov’s story was difficult and took time.

In his view, a Russian deserter today is in even greater danger than many other opponents of the war or political dissidents, because the Russian authorities see these former soldiers as traitors.

This puts Russian deserters in Kazakhstan and Armenia in a vulnerable position, because both countries host Russian military bases.

Korobov and other deserters can currently be protected from extradition to Russia because they hold the status of asylum seekers, but this does not protect them from the threat of abduction, Alkhastov explains.

Read this story in Russian here.

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Парламентская Ассамблея Совета Европы выбрала 15 членов делегации так называемой Платформы российских демократических сил. В этом списке можно найти хорошо известные не только в России, но и во всем мире имена, такие как бывший чемпион мира по шахматам Гарри Каспаров, предприниматель Михаил Ходорковский или участница «Пусси Райот» Надежда Толоконникова (все они признаны в России «иностранными агентами»). В то же время часть участников этой новой структуры, возможно, совсем не знакома широкой общественности. Так, например, пять мест в ней было отдано представителям коренных и малочисленных народов. Кто именно будет представлять россиян в ПАСЕ? Чем объясняется выбор ПАСЕ именно этих 15-и человек? И чем вообще будет заниматься Платформа российских демократических сил? На эти и другие вопросы отвечает корреспондент Русской службы Би-би-си Сергей Горяшко.

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