On the eve of elections, Putin’s Russia is at a new apogee of authoritarianism, coated in a patina of comfortable stability.
With , a story about traveling from the Arctic to Chechnya, 3,000 miles from north to south:
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Anton Troianovski
@antontroian
Moscow bureau chief for . Formerly with & in Moscow, Berlin and New York. anton.troianovski@nytimes.com
Joined September 2009
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Our front page story on Russia's use of convict fighters in Ukraine, a watershed move not seen since WWII that undermines the core tenets of a justice system & risks greater violence at home.
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The EU has created its own peace talks format between Azerbaijan and Armenia, running in parallel to Putin’s. The EU’s special envoy to the region told me he met twice with his Russian counterpart last fall.
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How a blocked road in the Caucasus underlines the reshaping of the region’s geopolitics by the war in Ukraine:
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How Putin is trying to prepare Russians for a long war - with
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So many critics of Putin and the war are jailed in Russia that there’s a new tradition: New Year’s greetings from political prisoners.
“The dawn comes after even the darkest night,” wrote.
“It will definitely come.”
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In Ryazan, I spoke to the mother of a killed soldier. She said she thought the invasion “should have been planned better,” to minimize losses, but she expressed no anger at Russia’s leadership. “Something had to be done,” she said, referring to Ukraine.
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Russian officials still routinely claim that evidence of war crimes in Bucha is “fake.” This painstaking investigation by my colleagues documents what really happened and names victims and possible perpetrators. youtu.be/IrGZ66uKcl0
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We've spent ten months reporting from inside Ukraine. With secret battle plans and interviews with Russian soldiers, here now is the story of what Putin's war looks like on the other side: a calamity of historic proportions with no end in sight.
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Privately, Russia’s liberal technocrats are horrified by the war in Ukraine.
But instead of breaking with Putin, the technocrats have cemented a role as his enablers, by helping the economy survive western sanctions.
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Putin’s war: our story on Russia’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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This week Putin drove across the Kerch bridge and held forth on nukes, supposed Polish revanchism, and the “harsh” practices of European zoos. In his system, the burst of activity is itself the message.
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A string of public appearances by Putin were seen as intended to show the Russian elite he remains in charge despite loses in the war.
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Putin, asked at presser whether one can believe reports of equipment problems at the front: "You can't trust anyone. You can only trust me."
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Dozhd has now had its license revoked 2x this yr: once in Russia, and now in Latvia. on what the unfolding drama tells us about emigre Russians' identity crisis, how an exiled media outlet perceives its audience, and what it means to be a liberal, anti-war Russian.
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An unscripted call to provide unspecified aid to Russian soldiers has put Russia's most prominent independent media outlet on the brink of closure, with Latvia revoking its media license on Tuesday. nytimes.com/2022/12/06/wor
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"Since the start of the mobilization in September, TV Rain’s audience has grown fivefold." on the crisis facing Russian independent journalists in exile in Europe.
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More than nine months after Russia invaded Ukraine, neither the war effort nor the Russian economy has collapsed. But the impact of an exodus of Western companies is evident in communities across Russia, and experts say the worst may be yet to come. nyti.ms/3iqkFPB
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“We threw away all our plans and reinvented ourselves as a media organization,” said Leonid Volkov, long Navalny’s chief of staff. reports from Vilnius:
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The apparent Kherson withdrawal: is Putin “not as crazy as we thought”?
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“They appeal to local governorates, contact military commanders or other soldiers, visit hospitals and morgues and spend countless hours online scanning videos of captured soldiers, as well as seeking advice from online chat groups.” By & Alina Lobzina
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The fate of many Russian soldiers in Ukraine has remained a mystery for their loved ones back home, who say the system for finding missing soldiers is as disorganized as the country’s military effort.
nyti.ms/3NKGV2t
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Three weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and nearly a year after the Kremlin moved to liquidate it, the Russian human rights organization Memorial carried on with its annual tribute to Stalin’s victims. By & in Moscow
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Putin in his Valdai speech now reads some lines critical of West from Dostoyevsky and other Russian writers, adds: “I am thankful, honestly, to my aides who found these quotes.”
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Hello from Moscow, which has changed since Sep. 21, when a mobilization campaign sent men fleeing across borders or to the army. Barbershop chairs are empty, pool halls full of women, the women left behind try to keep things going—until they can leave too.
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Brittney Griner “is not yet absolutely convinced that America will be able to take her home," her lawyer told me. "She is very worried about what the price of that will be, and she is afraid that she will have to serve the whole sentence here in Russia.”
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The shift was a possible signal that the Russian leader was interested in controlling the escalation of the war, and that he was not on the verge of provoking a direct conflict with NATO.
Today's story, with
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For months, Russia’s state media insisted that the country was only hitting military targets in Ukraine, leaving out the suffering that the invasion has brought to millions of civilians.
On Monday, the mask came off.
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A notable omission in Putin's brief Security Council address just now: any claim that the West was behind Ukraine's alleged attacks on Russian soil. A sign that Putin's threats of further escalation are currently focused on Ukraine itself.
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For months, Russian state media claimed the country was only hitting military targets in Ukraine. But today, the Kremlin clearly wants Russians to know about the extent of this morning's strikes. “Critical infrastructure facilities were damaged,” the Channel 1 anchor just said.
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“Of course, I have hopes, but I’m afraid to express them,” said Natalia Pinchuk, the wife of today's Belarusian Nobel laureate, Ales Bialiatski. “There is always this fear.”
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“This is important, especially now, because there is a direct threat that this will happen again.” on Memorial's Last Address project:
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“The number of Nobel laureates I know is growing by the year.”
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Memorial's Nobel win, after decades of painstaking work documenting historical crimes of the state and modern Russia's worst rights abuses, is in many ways an award for Natalia Estemirova.
She was murdered in Chechnya in 2009 shortly after Ramzan Kadyrov threatened her.
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My mum was Memorial and Memorial was my mum. She worked tirelessly to help the victims of the Russian war in Chechnya and hold the criminal regime to account. I wish she could be here to share this triumph with her colleagues. But everything we do, we do in her memory.
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Memorial just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Here is a story I wrote with about why the Russian state targeted it and tried to stop its operations:
As the Kremlin Revises History, a Human Rights Champion Becomes a Casualty
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Memorial published history books, educated schoolchildren, hosted exhibits and even offered walking tours of central Moscow. But under Putin, telling the truth about Russia’s history increasingly bordered on treason.
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US intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, report
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The Russian leader signed more than 400 pages of annexation laws, an example of how he has tried to legitimize his actions — however illegal — with a sheen of legality bestowed by Russia’s rubber-stamp institutions. nyti.ms/3Eh4FZa by
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The Kremlin said on Monday that it did not know where the borders are for the regions in Ukraine it recently claimed to have annexed.
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Two powerful Putin allies turned on Russia’s military leadership after it ordered a retreat from a key city in eastern Ukraine, a striking sign of dissent within the Russian elite.
One of them, Kadyrov, said Russia should use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
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“Russia’s power is based on its nuclear arsenal,” says an analyst in Moscow. The problem for Putin is how to wring real-world advantage from the destructive force of Russia’s nuclear warheads without actually using them.
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Sixty years ago this month, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought Washington and Moscow the closest they have ever been to reaching for nuclear weapons. Astoundingly, Putin is veering back toward that moment. An examination, with @antontroian and @julianbarnes
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