A 67-year-old woman was raped and murdered in the village of Buzhaninovo (Moscow region) on September 12. The authorities arrested two migrants from Tajikistan as suspects. The following evening, village residents tried to storm a dormitory that was home to more than 150 migrant workers employed by a local window factory. The next day, the Governor of the Moscow region ordered the eviction of all the migrants living in the dormitory. Buses promptly moved the workers out of Buzhaninovo, whisking them off to an unknown location. Meduza special correspondent Irina Kravtsova traveled to Buzhaninovo, where she witnessed local authorities -- now under intense media scrutiny -- scrambling to save face and put the village in order.

Alexey Navalny's team summed the impact of their "Smart Vote" initiative on the 2021 State Duma elections in a video released on Thursday, September 23. Thanking everyone who participated in the strategic voting initiative, Navalny's chief of staff Leonid Volkov asserted that Smart Vote's main achievement was to "stir up" the authorities' attempts to rig the election. He also called for the annulment of Moscow's electronic voting results and a complete recount of the ballots cast in St. Petersburg. Finally, Volkov said that Team Navalny supports any peaceful protests in response to the election, urging the losing parties and candidates to take the lead and "fight."

"Patriotic" activist Alexander Ionov sent an appeal to the Russian Attorney General's Office requesting an audit of The Bell's finances and for the news site to be declared a "foreign agent."

On the evening of Monday, September 20, the Communist Party (KPRF) organized a rally in downtown Moscow opposing voting rigging in the State Duma elections. Having been denied permission to hold an authorized protest, the gathering on Pushkin Square was positioned as a meeting with voters.

Following three days of voting over the weekend in the nationwide election to the State Duma, Russia's Central Election Commission reported on Tuesday, September 21, that 100 percent of the ballots casted had been processed.

The Russian social network VKontakte has blocked at least five pages belonging to individuals who formerly led regional campaign offices for opposition politician Alexey Navalny, reports the Net Freedoms Project.

Detectives in the UK have identified a third suspect in the Novichok poisoning attempt on Sergey and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England in May 2018. Metropolitan police named the third suspect as Denis Sergeev, identifying him as a member of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU.

On Monday, September 20, official election results showed that nominal opposition candidates running for the State Duma failed to win in any of Moscow's single-mandate constituencies.

On the morning of September 20, Timur Bekmansurov opened fire at a university campus in the Russian city of Perm. The 18-year-old shooter killed six people and injured at least 28 others. He was wounded by police and taken into custody. Meduza interviewed eyewitnesses who were at Perm State University at the time of the attack. In their own words, here's what they saw.

Russia's cultural capital of St. Petersburg has a reputation for "dirty elections" -- one so bad that even Russian election officials can't help but criticize them. And this weekend's voting in the elections to the State Duma and St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly were no exception. Election monitors reported widespread violations, both during the voting period and after the polls closed. What's more, St. Petersburg police carried out detentions and removed election monitors and poll workers from polling stations throughout the weekend. In the end, turnout in the elections was far below the national average, but United Russia's candidates still managed to come out on top.