The European Union adopted on Monday sanctions against a group of Russian private military contractors, accusing them of human rights abuses in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Africa.

A former deputy chief of staff for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, as well as a wealthy Russian businessman with reputed organized crime ties, were secretly involved in the illegal leasing of a lagoon for tourist developments in the Maldives, newly leaked documents show.

In 2009, a man known as “Putin’s masseur” bought a luxury villa on a Croatian island. The Pandora Papers show that behind the scenes a former Russian energy minister was playing a key role.

Since The Pandora Papers were unveiled less than 10 days ago, their findings have become the subject of European Commission media briefings, state leaders’ press conferences and government statements, while the world watches on to see what authorities will actually do.

The stepdaughter of Sergei Chemezov, the head of the giant state-owned military and defense conglomerate Rostec, is the beneficiary of a group of offshore companies with assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a superyacht, and businesses in European countries.

Georgy Bedzhamov, wanted in Russia over a high-profile embezzlement case, used the law firm Demetrios A. Demetriades LLC, known as Dadlaw, to conceal his assets and disguise transfers. Company records and contracts also show how he moved tens of millions of dollars around the world around the same time his sister embezzled billions of dollars from their bank, Vneshprombank.

Konstantin Ernst, a top executive at Russia’s Channel One, got a loan from a state-connected bank to acquire a stake in a project that saw beloved Moscow theaters demolished to make way for shopping malls.

YouTube videos posted by the Russian Orthodox Church, Foreign Ministry sources, and multiple flight records helped reporters identify a longtime companion of Russia’s pugnacious foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

A Russian mobile app publishing network appears to have infected millions of phones with malware that converts games into quiet money-making machines.

The last few months have been the most difficult for independent Russian journalists since the Soviet era. Here’s how the Putin regime is using ‘foreign agent’ designations to squeeze the life out of critical outlets that hold it to account.

Messages obtained by police from the confiscated phone of a senior Catalan official show that leaders of the Spanish region’s independence movement avoided commenting about some human rights issues to avoid spoiling their relationship with the Kremlin.

The U.S. and the U.K. levied sanctions on Friday against nine Russian individuals and two entities, in response to the poisoning of anti-corruption activist and Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.

Russia’s government on Friday named IStories Media a “foreign agent,” ramping up a campaign that has seen some of the country’s top independent media outlets effectively blacklisted this year.

The staff of IStories. Credit: Istories.

A close associate of the incarcerated Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, said on Wednesday that Russian state prosecutors have urged a court to declare her guilty of violating COVID-19 safety standards and impose two years of limitations on her.

At the time the United States and European countries had banned or limited export of vaccines against the coronavirus to first deal with the pandemic at home, Russia was willing to share its Sputnik V with countries in need.

For over a decade, Ikea has reportedly sourced wood for some of its products from companies guilty of illegally logging millions of pine trees from Russia’s boreal forest – a protected region that is considered pivotal towards efforts to combat climate change – according to an investigation published on Thursday by Earthsight.

Exiled Kremlin critic and former tycoon Mikhail Kodorkovsky said he was ready “to relocate” his media projects out of Russia after Moscow declared several European civil society and educational groups, including his, “undesirable on Russian territory.”

Two more of Alexei Navalny’s key supporters ran afoul of Moscow authorities this week in actions they say are intended to further undermine Navalny’s political movement.

Police in Moscow on Tuesday raided employees of Proekt (Project), an independent media outlet, on the same day the media published its investigation about Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

In Russia,  local news reports that a sophisticated black market for fake vaccine cards is thriving in secret Telegram forums even as COVID-19 runs rampant through the country.