On June 25, NATO leaders agreed at their annual summit on a goal of spending five percent of their gross domestic product on defense, more than doubling the old two-percent target. It’s unclear how many members will actually reach this goal. Even the target relies on some creative accounting: of the five percent, only 3.5 percent is pledged to what officials call “pure” defense spending, with the remainder going to security and defense-related “critical infrastructure.”

Ahead of the NATO summit, The New Yorker published “Collective Punishment: Why is Donald Trump upending America’s commitment to NATO?” a story by contributing writer Joshua Yaffa, the author of the 2021 Orwell Prize-winning book “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.” In his new article, Yaffa describes how the looming threats of Russian aggression and American withdrawal are pressuring European leaders to reassess their approach to NATO and their broader defense strategies. He joined this episode of The Naked Pravda to discuss the story.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Historian Benjamin Nathans joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, August 2024). In the post-Stalin USSR, when the regime seemed eternal and there was little tradition of resistance to totalitarianism, citizens who came up against the arbitrary Soviet justice system had to invent their own strategies for effecting change. Nathans looks beyond the familiar stories of figures like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn to explore how the dissident movement coalesced, and what that history can tell us today.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Anthropologist Jeremy Morris joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his latest book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury, March 2025). The conversation explores Morris’s extensive fieldwork across urban, regional, and rural Russia to understand how society has responded to the collapse of the USSR, capitalist social Darwinism, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. He shares insights into his ethnographic methods, emphasizing the importance of embedded, long-term relationships and the distinction between social suffering and geopolitical resentment. Morris also critiques the limitations and biases of polling data in news coverage and underscores the need for more diverse voices in understanding contemporary Russian society.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Naked Pravda interviews journalist and author Jill Dougherty about her new memoir, My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin, where she recounts her experiences studying and working in Russia. Dougherty talks about early influences, such as discovering the Russian language through an eccentric schoolteacher and later watching the Moon landing from a Leningrad dormitory. She shares insights from her decades-long career at CNN, covering key events from the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. Dougherty also discussed contemporary challenges in understanding Russia, restrictions on Western journalists, and the implications for future Russia experts.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Last month, as another 30 days of war passed in Ukraine, Russian activists, economists, and politicians in the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition spent much of their time arguing about a banking scandal from the last decade. The debate has been as mystifying to outsiders as it is confusing to those without an education in finance. 

With help from Ilya Shumanov, the general director of Transparency International-Russia in exile, The Naked Pravda breaks down the squabbling and criminal stakes at the heart of the scandal involving Probusinessbank, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and activist Maxim Katz.

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

On October 20, Moldovans cast their ballots in both a presidential election and a constitutional referendum — and the results shocked many.

In the referendum, which asked whether the country should change its constitution to include the goal of joining the European Union, the “yes” vote won by just over 50 percent. Meanwhile, in the presidential election, pro-E.U. incumbent Maia Sandu came in first but failed to win an outright majority. 

The day after the vote, Sandu accused “criminal groups” of attempting to undermine the democratic process by working with foreign forces to try and buy as many as 300,000 votes. Now, she’ll face pro-Russian candidate and former prosecutor general Alexandr Stoianoglo in a high-stakes run-off scheduled for November 3. 

What does all of this say about Moldova’s political landscape and future foreign policy orientation? To find out, The Naked Pravda spoke to Moldovan journalist and writer Paula Erizanu and Ecaterina Locoman, a senior lecturer in international studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute. 

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Earlier this week, journalists at WIRED and The Washington Post reported that a “Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos” appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote false sexual misconduct allegations against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

At WIRED, David Gilbert wrote that researchers have linked a group they’re calling “Storm-1516” to the campaign against Walz. “Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West,” Gilbert explained. A few days earlier, NBC News also reported on Storm-1516, citing its work as demonstrative of Russian propaganda’s growing utilization of artificial intelligence and more sophisticated bot networks.

Two days after the WIRED report, Washington Post journalist and Russia expert Catherine Belton reported on another bad actor implicated in spreading the allegations against Walz: John Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop with a long and winding record that includes internal affairs investigations, early discharge from the Marines, and a penchant for posting confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents, and judges on his blog, which led to 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping. To escape that indictment, Dougan fled to Moscow, where he soon put his conspiratorial blogging skills to work, effectively enlisting in the Russian intelligence community’s “Internet war” against America.

Records show and disinformation researchers argue that Dougan is responsible for content on dozens of fake news sites with deliberately misleading names like DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle, and Atlanta Observer. Lately, he’s reportedly started using a GRU-facilitated server and AI generator to create phony videos like the deepfake video showing one of Walz’s former students accusing him of sexual abuse.

With a little more than a week until the U.S. presidential election, Meduza spoke to Renée DiResta — the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality and an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy — about Russian propaganda, how it’s evolved over the years, and how American social networks are responding (and not responding) ahead of the November 2024 vote.

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

In the past few days, both the Zelensky administration in Kyiv and South Korea’s national spy agency have said that they believe North Korea has decided to send more than ten thousand troops to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. On October 18, following an emergency security meeting called by South Korea’s president, the country’s National Intelligence Service released an assessment claiming that the North is sending four brigades of 12,000 soldiers, including special forces, to Ukraine, which would be an unprecedented move, if true.

Diplomats in Russia and North Korea say these reports are false.

Meanwhile, American officials have warned repeatedly of the growing military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, saying that Washington has observed signs of increased material support to Moscow, including both artillery shells and missiles, such as KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles that have been recovered from wreckage in Ukraine. According to British journalists, North Korea supplies Russia with about half of the approximately three million artillery shells that Russian forces use annually in the war against Ukraine.

However, Western officials have expressed skepticism about the claims that North Korea is sending large numbers of soldiers, apart from smaller groups of engineers and observers. For example, just the other day, NATO’s general secretary spoke at a press conference right alongside Zelensky and directly contradicted him, saying there is no evidence that North Korean soldiers are involved in the fight.

For a crash course in Russian-North Korean relations and a hard look at recent claims from the Ukrainian and South Korean governments of thousands of North Korean soldiers flooding the battlefield in Ukraine, The Naked Pravda welcomed Dr. Fyodor Tertitskiy, a lecturer at Korea University and a leading researcher on North Korean politics.

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Russian government’s new draft budget for 2025 through 2027 was introduced to the State Duma this week in its first reading. The state’s proposed spending exceeds earlier predictions, with 41.5 trillion rubles (more than $435 billion) allocated for next year alone — and that may not be the final amount. A record share of the budget is classified as “secret” or “top secret” — nearly a third of all proposed expenditures. 

To discuss the draft budget, focusing on allocations to the military, The Naked Pravda welcomed back Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, a former columnist for the business newspaper Vedomosti, and a former senior advisor at Russia’s Central Bank.

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Wildberries founder and CEO Tatyana Kim (who recently restored her maiden name) has been having a hell of a time shaking loose her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, but their very public divorce is just the tip of the iceberg in what’s become a battle between some of the most powerful political groups in Russia’s North Caucasus.

On September 18: Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to storm the company’s office in the Romanov Dvor business center — just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin itself. Bakalchuk has very publicly opposed the Wildberries-RussGroup merger and recently met with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to plead his case, winning the dictator’s support. At the Moscow office, Bakalchuk’s entourage had two former senior executives, but — more importantly — he was accompanied by former and current Chechen police officers and National Guardsmen, as well as trained martial artists from Chechnya, including former world and European taekwondo champion Umar Chichaev. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, Chichaev fired his service weapon, though his status in the National Guard is a bit fuzzy.

On the other side of the conflict, defending the Wildberries office was another team of police and police-adjacent men with ties to Ingushetia. According to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Wildberries had recently hired a private security company with ties to Ingush State Duma deputy Bekkhan Barakhoev, who, until three years ago, worked as a vice president of a subsidiary of Russ Outdoor — the smaller company now merging with Wildberries. The most important shadow figure at Russ Outdoor, meanwhile, is Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire senator from Dagestan.

The office shootout left two Ingush men dead and more than two dozen suspects in police custody, though Vladislav Bakalchuk miraculously escaped charges as a mere witness. He claims he merely showed up for a planned business meeting, but Tatyana Kim calls the incident a failed attempt at a hostile takeover. To learn more about this story and its broader political context, The Naked Pravda spoke to Ilya Shumanov, the general director of Transparency International-Russia in exile.

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Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно