Over the weekend, Moscow investigators separated a Chinese national from his one-year-old son born of a surrogate mother and charged the man with human trafficking. The child is now hospitalized. Mikhail Baklanov, the lawyer representing Liu Jun, says the authorities interrogated his client for 15 hours before they finally arrested him, despite a past court order that allows him to return with his son to China, where his wife awaits them both.

On June 28, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov published an opinion piece titled "The Law, Rights, and the Rules," in which he claimed that "in many Western countries, students learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual." By all appearances, Lavrov, or perhaps his aides, got this information from a popular video circulating on TikTok. The video, in which a mother listens in as her son argues that Jesus was bisexual and non-binary, has gained nearly 11 million views since it was uploaded in late May. Journalists from the Russian outlet It's My Media were the first to trace Lavrov's claims to the viral video.

Last week, election officials in Moscow refused to register opposition politician Ilya Yashin's candidacy in an upcoming by-election for the City Duma. He isn't alone: the authorities also rejected a candidacy bid for the State Duma by Oleg Stepanov, Alexey Navalny's former coordinator in Moscow. In both cases, officials cited a new law that prohibits anyone with recent connections to organizations designated as "extremist" (including Navalny's campaign offices and the Anti-Corruption Foundation) from running for elected office. While the new law's applicability is expansive, Meduza explains why it is nevertheless illegal at this time to bar the candidacies of Yashin and Stepanov.

Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin filing a lawsuit against Meduza has given us access to notarized copies of old court rulings involving him. We acknowledge the error in our 2016 article (which did contain an incorrect assertion pertaining to Prigozhin's criminal record) and wish to correct it without making any claims about Prigozhin's honor, dignity, or professional reputation. As such, we're publishing a complete translation of the cassation court's ruling on Prigozhin's appeal against a verdict sentencing him to 13 years in a medium-security penal colony. This took place in 1981.

On the morning of June 29, Moscow police raided the homes of three journalists from the investigative outlet Proekt: editor-in-chief Roman Badanin, his first deputy Mikhail Rubin, and correspondent Maria Zholobova. After seizing their laptops, cell phones, flash drives, and SIM cards, the police took the journalists in for questioning. They were later released after being declared witnesses in a criminal libel case initiated in late 2017 at the request of businessman Ilya Traber - an alleged mobster from St. Petersburg, who's also a long-time acquaintance of Vladimir Putin. After leaving the interrogation, Roman Badnin told the press that the reason for the raids wasn't the Traber case, but rather an investigation that Proekt published that same day: a deep dive into the alleged family wealth of Russia's top police official, Vladimir Kolokoltsev (You can read Meduza's summary here). Meduza special correspondent Anastasia Yakoreva spoke with the three journalists about what the police were looking for, the questions they asked, and what Proekt plans to do next.

On June 28, the investigative news website Proekt announced its latest report: a deep dive into the personal history and family wealth of Russia's top cop, Vladimir Kolokoltsev. The next morning, police officers raided the homes of Maria Zholobova, the story's author, and Proekt editor-in-chief Roman Badanin. At Zholobova's home, officials detained Proekt deputy chief editor Mikhail Rubin, whose parents were also visited by the police on Tuesday. The authorities acted under the umbrella of a defamation case related to a documentary series that aired back in 2017 on the television network Dozhd, which Badanin and Zholobova co-created. Despite the raids, Proekt nevertheless released its new report about Kolokoltsev. Meduza summarizes it here.

Last year, President Vladimir Putin's annual call-in show was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. But on Wednesday, June 30, the "direct line" made its return to national television. Despite some technical hiccups, Putin answered questions from Russian residents for four hours straight. Meduza watched the whole thing and summed up Putin's most interesting remarks about vaccination against COVID-19, hyper-local issues, and his presidency, in a nutshell.

In a new investigative report published by Open Media, Ilya Rozhdestvensky profiles Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu's daughter Ksenia, who is just 30 years old but oversees billions of rubles in investments and youth programs. According to Open Media's findings, the entire Shoigu family leverages state funding and government connections in its business dealings. Meduza summarizes the story here.

Eight years ago yesterday, on June 30, 2013, Russia's "gay propaganda" law entered into force, banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" among minors. In spite of this legislation, LGBTQ+ people have become much more visible in Russian society in recent years and there's a lot more information in the public sphere about their lives and the difficulties they face. At the same time, state-sanctioned homophobia has intensified. LGBTQ+ Russians are regularly subjected to aggression, often incited by the authorities. Meduza breaks down the consequences of homophobia being made part of the Russian state's ideology.

In a new investigative report, Novaya Gazeta journalist Alexandra Dzhordzhevich examines how Russia's draft boards sometimes ignore conscription exceptions for university students, terrifying young people and sparking legal battles with schools. At the heart of these disputes is the summer break between undergraduate and graduate studies, known as "postgraduate holidays" in Russia, where the military drafts roughly 135,000 men between the ages of 18 and 27, every year from April 1 to July 15. Students rely on this vacation period to ward off eligibility for conscription in the summer, but Novaya Gazeta found that some draft boards pursue them, nevertheless. Meduza summarizes the story here.