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According to Meduza's sources, Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin has bankrolled another made-for-TV movie about mercenaries from the Wagner group. The film is scheduled to premiere on August 18, on the pro-Kremlin channel NTV - the same television network that released a Prigozhin-backed action movie about Russian fighters in the Central African Republic earlier this year. Titled "Solntsepyok" ("Blazing Sun"), this new flick is set in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and allegedly "based on real events." Publications linked to Prigozhin were the first to announce the film's release. One source who worked on another movie sponsored by Prigozhin described this latest project as an attempt to put forward a "romanticized propaganda version" of the mercenary group and thereby launder Wagner's image.

In roughly a month, on September 17, three-day parliamentary elections will begin in Russia. Using party lists, opinion polls, and turnout estimates in each region across the country, it's relatively easy to predict the results. As ever, the biggest changes are taking place inside United Russia, the nation's ruling political party. What's the logic behind such changes, and whom should we expect to see in the new legislature? Political scientist Alexander Kynev explains.

Belarusian state broadcasters have aired multiple interviews with opposition journalist Roman Protasevich since he was arrested in Minsk in May. But until earlier this week, he had yet to speak to any foreign media outlets. The Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT published an interview with Protasevich on Wednesday, August 11. In conversation with special correspondent Konstantin Pridybailo, who reported on last year's mass protests in Belarus for RT, Protasevich repeated many of the same talking points he covered on Belarusian state television. That said, he did reveal previously unknown plans to launch his own "neutral" media outlet.

Since the death of Russian businessman Andrey Trubnikov in January, the organic cosmetics brand Natura Siberica has gone into a tailspin. With his relatives caught up in a court battle over how to divide the company's shares, control passed to a trustee who initiated controversial leadership changes. On Thursday, August 12, the company's employees - who have sided with Natura Siberica co-founder Irina Trubnikova (Trubnikov's first wife) - accused the new management of carrying out a raider attack. This came after a number of key employees were denied access to the company's office and computer databases, and reportedly replaced by "unknown people." Irina Trubnikova says she's in shock after being shut out of the company's operations and is now willing to enter into negotiations to "preserve the brand," on the condition that her employees get their jobs back.

Catastrophic wildfires are still sweeping Russia's Siberian region of Yakutia. The authorities declared an "interregional state of emergency" on Saturday, August 13. According to the Federal Agency for Forestry (Rosleskhoz), since the start of 2021, fires have destroyed more than seven million hectares (about 17.3 million acres) of forest - an area the size of Ireland or Georgia. NASA said that at the beginning of August, smoke from Yakutia's wildfires reached the North Pole. Earlier this month, photographer Denis Sinyakov spent several days in Yakutia's Ust-Aldansky District alongside the people who are charged with fighting the forest fires - the smokejumpers from the Aerial Forest Protection Service (Avialesokhrana). Meduza shares Denis Sinyakov's photographs and recollections here.

On August 9, 2020, Belarusians went to the polls to choose a president. According to official data, Alexander Lukashenko won in a landslide, receiving more than 80% of the vote. After the results were announced, people came out to protest in unprecedented numbers - the protest march in Minsk alone had hundreds of thousands of participants. Soon after, however, the government cracked down on dissent. The authorities have prosecuted thousands of protesters, and continue to send people to penal colonies under absurd charges, though the protests themselves ended long ago. To learn more about the dramatic changes Belarus has undergone as a result of the protests, Meduza turned to the protesters themselves.

In recent years, there has been a growing number of artistic ventures about the lives of LGBTQ+ people in Russia. One of them is the art project PASHA. Though he doesn't reveal his real name or the details of his biography, the artist behind the project regularly publishes new works on Instagram under the handle @go_pasha_go. The account's bio describes the author as an "Anonymous Artist. Born gay in the Soviet Union, living gay in Russia." And his works range from collages of Soviet politicians and Disney characters alongside homophobic slurs, to anonymized self-portraits, and a combination "LGBT USSR" flag. Meduza sits down with the author of the art project PASHA to find out the story behind these works.

Late on August 17, police officers across Moscow visited dozens of Alexey Navalny's former supporters whose personal information has leaked online in recent months. According to the human rights project OVD-Info, at least 170 people have heard from the authorities in the past 24 hours. Officials are reportedly singling out those who either registered with Navalny's team for protests in April, signed up for Navalny's "Smart Vote" strategic voting platform, or donated money at some point to the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Hackers previously stole and released these people's personal data, and the police are now asking victims to press charges against Navalny's team for mishandling their information. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova spoke to several of the people visited by the authorities.

Officials in Russia are expelling Afghan nationals who arrived in the country before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, says a new report from the Russian BBC. In one case in July, officials in the Leningrad region deported a 12-year-old girl and her family members, who had fled Afghanistan after the Taliban tried to force the child into a marriage. Several other Afghan nationals are in custody after being arrested at the St. Petersburg Interior Ministry while attempting to apply for asylum. Many of the detainees arrived in Russia during the Euro 2020 soccer championship earlier this summer.

In the early 1990s, Artem Chernov was studying physics at Moscow State University and simultaneously taking photography courses at the Union of Journalists of the USSR. When a coup attempt began in Moscow on August 19, 1991, Chernov packed his bag with his camera and film and headed to the White House. Years later, the photographer compiled his snapshots of these events into a book titled, "Three Days at the End of the History Textbook. August 1991." To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the attempted August Coup, Meduza's photo editors selected the most important photographs from Artem Chernov's book and asked the photographer to tell the stories behind them.