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PODCAST

The Naked Pravda

Медуза / Meduza

Meduza’s English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda highlights how our top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. The broader context of Meduza’s in-depth, original journalism isn’t always clear, which is where this show comes in. Here you’ll hear from the world’s community of Russia experts, activists, and reporters about issues that are at the heart of Meduza’s stories and crucial to major events in and around Russia.

news & politics

All Episodes

00:26:26

Here’s what you do when Russia won’t stay out of your...

The Naked Pravda ·

2025/09/24

In recent weeks, Estonia, Poland, and Romania have reported breaches of their airspace by Russian aircraft. Just this week, Norway revealed that Russian aircraft have violated its airspace three times this year after more than a decade without such intrusions. Last week, three Russian fighter jets reportedly violated Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, flying miles deep into Estonian territory with their transponders off. The most extreme incident was in Poland, where NATO allies shot down four

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00:50:27

Joshua Yaffa explains how Donald Trump got NATO to...

The Naked Pravda ·

2025/07/02

On June 25, NATO leaders agreed at their annual summit on a goal of spending five percent of their gross domestic product on defense, more than doubling the old two-percent target. It’s unclear how many members will actually reach this goal. Even the target relies on some creative accounting: of the five percent, only 3.5 percent is pledged to what officials call “pure” defense spending, with the remainder going to security and defense-related “critical infrastructure.”Ahead of the NATO summit,

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00:53:59

Pulitzer-winner Benjamin Nathans on the Soviet...

The Naked Pravda ·

2025/06/23

Historian Benjamin Nathans joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, August 2024). In the post-Stalin USSR, when the regime seemed eternal and there was little tradition of resistance to totalitarianism, citizens who came up against the arbitrary Soviet justice system had to invent their own strategies for effecting change. Nathans looks beyond the familiar stories of figures like

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01:16:16

Everyday politics in Russia with Jeremy Morris

The Naked Pravda ·

2025/05/28

Anthropologist Jeremy Morris joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his latest book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury, March 2025). The conversation explores Morris’s extensive fieldwork across urban, regional, and rural Russia to understand how society has responded to the collapse of the USSR, capitalist social Darwinism, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. He shares insights into his ethnographic methods, emphasizing the importance of embedded, long-term relationships

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00:46:36

Jill Dougherty’s Russia

The Naked Pravda ·

2025/04/29

The Naked Pravda interviews journalist and author Jill Dougherty about her new memoir, My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin, where she recounts her experiences studying and working in Russia. Dougherty talks about early influences, such as discovering the Russian language through an eccentric schoolteacher and later watching the Moon landing from a Leningrad dormitory. She shares insights from her decades-long career at CNN, covering key events from the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris

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00:34:28

The banking scandal that broke Russia’s anti-Kremlin...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/11/09

Last month, as another 30 days of war passed in Ukraine, Russian activists, economists, and politicians in the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition spent much of their time arguing about a banking scandal from the last decade. The debate has been as mystifying to outsiders as it is confusing to those without an education in finance. With help from Ilya Shumanov, the general director of Transparency International-Russia in exile, The Naked Pravda breaks down the squabbling and criminal stakes at the

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00:36:42

Moldova’s knife-edge election and E.U. referendum

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/11/02

On October 20, Moldovans cast their ballots in both a presidential election and a constitutional referendum — and the results shocked many.In the referendum, which asked whether the country should change its constitution to include the goal of joining the European Union, the “yes” vote won by just over 50 percent. Meanwhile, in the presidential election, pro-E.U. incumbent Maia Sandu came in first but failed to win an outright majority. The day after the vote, Sandu accused “criminal groups”

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00:42:03

How Russian propaganda and ordinary Americans build...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/10/26

Earlier this week, journalists at WIRED and The Washington Post reported that a “Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos” appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote false sexual misconduct allegations against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. At WIRED, David Gilbert wrote that researchers have linked a group they’re calling “Storm-1516” to the campaign against Walz. “Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos,

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00:29:14

North Korea's role in the Ukraine War

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/10/19

In the past few days, both the Zelensky administration in Kyiv and South Korea’s national spy agency have said that they believe North Korea has decided to send more than ten thousand troops to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. On October 18, following an emergency security meeting called by South Korea’s president, the country’s National Intelligence Service released an assessment claiming that the North is sending four brigades of 12,000 soldiers, including special forces, to Ukraine,

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00:28:15

Breaking down Russia's 2025 war budget

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/10/05

The Russian government’s new draft budget for 2025 through 2027 was introduced to the State Duma this week in its first reading. The state’s proposed spending exceeds earlier predictions, with 41.5 trillion rubles (more than $435 billion) allocated for next year alone — and that may not be the final amount. A record share of the budget is classified as “secret” or “top secret” — nearly a third of all proposed expenditures. To discuss the draft budget, focusing on allocations to the military, The

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00:25:45

The North Caucasian clan warfare behind a deadly...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/09/29

Wildberries founder and CEO Tatyana Kim (who recently restored her maiden name) has been having a hell of a time shaking loose her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, but their very public divorce is just the tip of the iceberg in what’s become a battle between some of the most powerful political groups in Russia’s North Caucasus. On September 18: Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to storm the company’s office in the Romanov Dvor business center — just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin itself. Bakalchuk has

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00:45:26

America's expanding crackdown on RT and Moscow's...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/09/18

Last month, the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri Simes, a former think tank executive and an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In late August, The New York Times reported that these searches were part of the U.S. Justice Department’s “broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks.”In the past two weeks, U.S. officials have

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00:22:45

Iranian ballistic missiles have entered the Ukraine...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/09/13

The Pentagon says it’s confirmed that Iran has given “a number of close-range ballistic missiles to Russia.” While Washington isn’t sure exactly how many rockets are being handed over to Moscow, the U.S. Defense Department assesses that Russia could begin putting them to use within a few weeks, “leading to the deaths of even more Ukrainian civilians.”“One has to assume that if Iran is providing Russia with these types of missiles, that it’s very likely it would not be a one-time good deal, that

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00:34:57

The science of Russian Internet censorship and...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/08/24

Russia’s federal censor has been throttling YouTube playback speeds for the last month or so, just like it slowed Twitter data transfer speeds back in 2021. Throughout August, Russian Internet users have reported sudden and widespread outages in access to popular apps and services like Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, and more. While the RuNet crackdown has become a familiar feature of the Putin regime, its technical side is hard to understand.For help with the science of

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00:37:23

Russian conscripts and Ukraine's Kursk offensive

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/08/17

It’s been almost two weeks since the Ukrainian Armed Forces smashed through Russia’s border defenses in the Kursk region and began a surprise offensive that has advanced about 17 miles at its deepest point, according to Meduza’s estimates. Regional officials in Kursk have evacuated towns along the Ukrainian border, and more than 120,000 people have been forced to leave their homes. Vladimir Putin has met several times with top national security officials, but Russia’s president hasn’t yet bothered

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00:39:49

The long-term economic effects of Russia’s war in...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/06/15

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West has imposed over 16,000 sanctions on Russia, intending to cripple the economy driving the Kremlin’s war machine. But the much-anticipated collapse of Russia’s economy never came to pass. In fact, Russia’s wartime economy has proven to be surprisingly resilient, with the IMF estimating that Russia’s GDP grew by 3.5% in 2023 and will continue to grow by 3.2% in 2024. The Kremlin has managed to keep Russia’s economy afloat, in large part,

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00:30:40

How can Ukraine hold the line against Russia?

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/06/08

It’s a tense moment for Ukraine. The optimism that followed Ukraine’s early successes on the battlefield in 2022 started to fade last summer as its counteroffensive failed to achieve a breakthrough. By late 2023, Ukraine’s then-commander-in-chief said the war had reached a “stalemate” — and by the start of the spring, things were looking even worse, with high-ranking Ukrainian officers warning a collapse of the front lines could be imminent without more weapons from Washington. In mid-April, U.S

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00:45:31

Kazakhstan's landmark murder trial

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/05/31

For the past two months, millions of Kazakhstanis have been glued to their screens, witnessing a landmark moment in the nation’s history: a murder trial live-streamed on YouTube. This was the trial of Kuandyk Bishimbayev, Kazakhstan’s former economic minister, who was convicted of torturing and killing his wife, Saltanat Nukenova, on November 9, 2023. The brutal CCTV footage of the incident went viral, not just within Kazakhstan but internationally as well. This trial not only highlighted Saltanat

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00:37:32

‘The American faith’: Why Russia targets evangelicals...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/05/25

Historically, Ukraine has been home to people of a variety of faiths and religious denominations, and it’s been exceptionally “open to receiving a wide spectrum of religious communities” in the years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R, according to expert Catherine Wanner.This laissez-faire approach to religion stands in stark contrast to Russian state policy, which claims to embrace religious pluralism while systematically repressing religious liberty. In Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine,

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00:28:39

Corruption and co-optation in Russia’s autocracy

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/05/18

It’s strange days recently at Russia’s Defense Ministry. Amid the replacement of the agency’s head, police have brought large-scale bribery charges against at least two senior officials in the Defense Ministry, raising questions about the state of corruption in Russia’s military and the Kremlin’s approach to the phenomenon in wartime. Also earlier this month, the American Political Science Review published relevant new research by political scientist David Szakonyi, an assistant professor at

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175 results

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