In mid-July 2021, the Russian Attorney General's Office declared the investigative news outlet Proekt an "undesirable organization," effectively outlawing the publication. That same day, the Justice Ministry designated five Proekt journalists (including editor-in-chief Roman Badannin) as "foreign agents." In the weeks that followed, state officials added nearly all of Proekt's former reporters to the "foreign agents" registry, even designating some journalists who left the project long before its "undesirable" status. One of these people was Pyotr Manyakhin, a journalist in Novosibirsk, who is now challenging the Justice Ministry's decision in court. The agency has now shared its objections to this lawsuit. Meduza breaks down the authorities' peculiar logic.

Scammers are using websites disguised as the sites of well-known Russian laboratories to sell fake coronavirus test certificates, according to a new report from the St. Petersburg-based 47news. Journalist Viktor Smirnov reported that he was able to gain access to the admin panel used to run these "clone" sites, where clients can order falsified proof of PCR test results.

On the morning of Monday, November 1, Russia reported that 40,402 new coronavirus cases had been registered in the last 24 hours, as well as 1,155 fatalities. This marks the third day in a row that the country has seen more than 40,000 new cases.

From graduating from the prestigious Bauman Moscow State Technical University to serving as Russia's deputy education minister and Sberbank's vice president, Marina Rakova has had an impressive career as a public figure. Nonetheless, on October 7, she was sent to a pre-trial detention center on charges of large-scale embezzlement. Rakova's former Sberbank colleagues Maxim Inkin and Yevgeny Zak were also detained, as well as former Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences ("Shaninka") director Kristina Kryuchkova and rector Sergey Zuyev. Meduza explains the charges -- and how they're connected to recent attempts by Rakova and others to restructure Russia's education system.

Communist Party (KPRF) lawmaker Valery Rashkin was detained on charges of illegal hunting, TASS reported on Friday, October 29. A source in law enforcement told the state news agency that Rashkin was stopped in the Lysogorsky District of the Saratov Region while driving under the influence, and that police found an elk carcass in his vehicle.

On Friday, October 29, a Moscow court sentenced blogger Ruslan Bobiev and his girlfriend, model Anastasia Chistova, to 10 months in prison for "offending religious sentiment."

Since early October, there have been ongoing protests in Tbilisi by political oppositionists demanding the release of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was arrested after secretly crossing the border into Georgia and returning to the country for the first time in eight years. He now faces at least six years in prison. Meduza asked Georgian journalist Diana Shanava to recount how the former president's homecoming has divided Georgian society.

Federal investigators in St. Petersburg are hot on the trail of another potentially offensive work of art. This latest culprit is a painting by Kirill Miller depicting a crowd of people carrying portraits of rotting, dead-eyed ghouls. Wounded members of the public say the piece, titled "The Living and the Dead," mocks the "Immortal Regiment" -- an annual march staged in many cities across Russia on Victory Day where participants carry portraits of ancestors who fought in World War II. Miller says his painting predates the Immortal Regiment tradition, which emerged less than a decade ago, but state officials seem keen to police this apparently unforgivable assault on the feelings of veterans and their descendants.

A resident of the Russian city of Tomsk spent three days passing himself off as a doctor in order to sneak into a coronavirus hospital's "red zone" and care for his grandmother, after she was hospitalized with pneumonia. The grandson claimed that medical workers weren't treating or feeding the elderly woman, or changing her diapers. After being found out, the man tried to bring his grandmother's case to the attention of local authorities, but no one answered his phone calls. He then decided to fly to Moscow, where he succeeded in getting the Attorney General's Office to launch an inquiry.

Deputies in the Tatarstan State Council have voted against proposed federal legislation that would force all regional heads across the country to adopt the same title, abolishing Tatarstan's own "presidency." Tatarstan is Russia's last holdout that still calls its regional head of state "president" -- a fiercely guarded totem of local independence. The federal government in Moscow has spent more than a decade pursuing greater centralization and trying to pressure and persuade officials in the republic to drop the title so that the Kremlin alone can claim it. In contemporary Russian politics, it's only mild hyperbole to compare the vote in the State Council to separatism. Meduza explains why the local presidency is so important to Tatarstan and how the federal authorities will likely respond to this affront.