A 15-year-old Russian has a shorter life expectancy than a peer in Bangladesh, Cambodia, or Yemen.

A dispatch from Donetsk.

The aging action star’s second wind abroad: political maneuvering, many guns and, most importantly, a market for his B movies.

Catching up with Edward Snowden in Moscow.

A profile of Garry Kasparov, who exiled himself from Russia last year and is running for president of FIDE, the governing body of chess. The election has become the dirtiest in FIDE history and a proxy debate over freedom and Russia’s future; Kasparov’s opponent has the full backing of Vladimir Putin.

What U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul has seen in Russia since he arrived two and a half years ago.

Barack Obama on Africa, Putin and the gap between what CEOs tell him over lunch and what they tell their lobbyists.

How the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 rippled around the world, from the battlefield of Ukraine to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam to the White House.

A conversation with one of Russia’s “little green men”: a 24-year-old recruited to fight in Eastern Ukraine.

An American woman's travels and memories of her Russian husband.

"When Bramya was abroad, Sarah mixed adhesives, ordered glaze, saw friends, and lived without the expectation of change to this arrangement. She read his letters and answered his phone calls, and they talked about the things they did when they were apart, neither acknowledging that separation had come to be as familiar as the shape their bodies took together. But when she knew his flight had landed, she sat at the kitchen table with painful patience, rolling clay from hand to hand until it was made pliable by the heat of her skin, piecing together anxiety animals, anticipating the sound of the cab door closing that told her Bramya was on her street."

"For 20 beautiful years, my homeland was open and (kind of) free. Now, I fear, it’s closing back up."

Previously: Keith Gessen on the Longform Podcast.

On the dueling propagandists of Kiev and Moscow.

Since 2007, when they first heard that “the Florida of Russia” was being awarded the Winter Olympics, two Dutch journalists have been documenting everyday life in Sochi and how it has changed in the run-up to the Games.

The Russian president has crushed all dissent, but he’s more vulnerable than ever.

The coordinated government attack on queer Russia.

An adventure on the Beringia, a dog sled race stretching 685 miles over Russia’s frozen tundra.

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

The rise and fall of the new oligarchs, who raided the Russian state. When Putin came to power most fled, but not Mikhail Khodorkovsky: “The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.”

A jailhouse interview with Vladimir Putin’s rival at the very end of his decade behind bars.

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales vanished from the ocean. The mystery is not who killed them, but why.

Returning to Forth Worth after two and a half defection years in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald became friends with a Russian emigre family with a son of his age. After Kennedy was shot, they would be called on to translate the Secret Service interrogation of his young Russian wife.

The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.

The bumpy ride from St. Petersburg and Moscow, through a Russia slipping back into the 19th century.

The rise of the Night Wolves, a Kremlin-backed biker gang, and what it says about the Russian political condition.