Analytics

By October 16, Yandex had brought most everyday services back online, but cloud operations and advertising tools remained restricted. What is known about the three damaged data centers, the fate of its supercomputers and the competing timelines for a full recovery?

Ella Pamfilova entered Russian politics as a trade union organizer, challenged the privileges of the Soviet party elite, joined the democratic movement and later chaired the president's human rights council. Since 2016, she has led Russia's Central Election Commission, which has certified election results amid documented irregularities and restrictions on political competition. FACTUM.press examined her career, the commission's decisions and the questions of potential responsibility raised by Russian criminal law.

Vladislav Surkov began his career in advertising and some of Russia's largest businesses before spending almost two decades helping shape the Kremlin's domestic political system. His name is associated with the emergence of the ruling party, pro-Kremlin youth movements and the doctrine of “sovereign democracy.” From 2013 onward, he became an important intermediary in Moscow's dealings with the conflict in Ukraine. FACTUM.press examined his career, political decisions, leaked office correspondence and intercepted conversations presented in the MH17 investigation, asking what these records establish—and what they do not—about his personal responsibility.

An October 8 drone strike shut down Yandex's data center in Sasovo, Russia. The company has identified two supercomputers at the site, together containing 2,688 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Their condition remains undisclosed. We examine the potential cost of replacing the computing systems and what a prolonged outage could mean for Russian AI development.

Plague bacteria still circulate among wild animals in Russia, but this does not mean an epidemic is spreading among people. The death of a researcher at an anti-plague institute near Irkutsk in October 2026 prompted an investigation and questions from the WHO; plague had not been confirmed as of October 8. We examine the evidence, historical epidemics, natural plague foci and today's surveillance system.

Since FACTUM’s August review, Bureau 1440 has shown that Rassvet can do more than simply stay in orbit: the network connected real users in the Russian Arctic, the first spacecraft from the July batch reached the roughly 500 km orbital band, and the company unveiled a production-model terminal rated at up to 700 Mbps. But there is still no public evidence of a third batch launch. The question now is whether a working prototype can become a network.

Over three and a half years, Russian authorities moved from tax cases against Lerchek, Alexandra Mitroshina and Elena Blinovskaya to prison sentences for Blinovskaya, Ayaz Shabutdinov and Dmitry Portnyagin, an in-absentia conviction of Gusein Gasanov, and a separate registration system for major bloggers. Publicly available evidence does not prove that the criminal cases were launched in order to control their audiences. But the outcome is clear: in Russia, a large online following is no longer an autonomous business asset operating largely outside the state.

Russia struck bridges across the Dnipro in Kyiv for a second day, temporarily closing the South Bridge and Paton Bridge; one person was killed in the capital. Ukraine continued attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, while Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak acknowledged a small gasoline shortage. BBC Russian, Mediazona and a team of volunteers have identified by name 266,032 Russian servicemen killed since the start of the full-scale invasion. Japan announced a new sanctions package, while in Russia Astra founder Anastasia Chumakova was sentenced in absentia to seven years in prison and Zhanna Nemtsova was designated a “foreign agent.”

Russia continued strikes on Ukraine, including on energy infrastructure. Moscow is preparing to send about 120,000 men called up in the autumn conscription campaign to military units. Vladimir Putin again raised the possibility of nuclear weapons use in the event of a direct attack on Russian territory. Turkey and the UN are preparing a new round of talks, while the United States considers additional sanctions on Russia.

On September 29, Vladimir Putin awarded 51 Channel One employees. In a single month, 106 employees of the network received state honors. How orders, state recognition and parliamentary careers became part of Russia’s system for rewarding the propaganda machine.

This article reflects information available as of 27 September 2026. In brief Of the 30 million paper ballots the Central Election Commission credited to United Russia in the 18–20 September State Duma election, at…

The substance of the new law is not the sanctions lists aimed at Moscow but the tariff powers aimed at its customers: access to the American market becomes a lever over Beijing, Delhi and Ankara. What the administration must do within 30 days, why the list of target countries is still disputed, and what stands in the way of using the law in full.

The short version. Bloomberg reports that Kremlin officials and staff at army recruitment centres have been moving assets abroad and urging relatives to leave Russia. At the same time, regional budget data show that…

On August 23, a police officer on an Arkansas highway pulled over a minivan carrying commercial cargo and ran the driver's documents through the system. Within a day, Artyom Kosolapov — a Russian with a work permit, a…

Since 2023 a travel ban can take effect without a court and before any draft board has ruled — generated automatically in a database the day a summons is issued. In September 2026 the mechanism reached the documents themselves: men on the military register began being refused foreign-travel passports.

The second batch of Rassvet satellites went up on 19 July. By the end of August, public catalogues showed something they had not shown in July: not one spacecraft from that batch has climbed above 360 kilometres, and…

An ordinary morning in 2026, somewhere in Rostov, Kazan or, these days, Moscow. You step out of the house and open the taxi app — the wheel spins. You try to pay by phone at the shop — the payment fails. Your messenger…

The bottom line. Russia is not stripping its emigres of citizenship — the constitution expressly forbids it. Instead, on 22 July the State Duma passed a law that switches off every function citizenship performs:…

Russia is rolling out Rassvet, a low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation billed as a domestic answer to Starlink. In four months it has produced two serial launches, its first burned-up satellite, and assurances from…

In early February 2026, thousands of Starlink terminals fell silent across the Russian front all at once. SpaceX had switched on whitelist verification and cut off everything not registered in Ukraine — that is,…

Last Saturday in Miami, outside a bare-knuckle boxing event, US marshals put handcuffs on the two most famous misogynists on the planet: Andrew and Tristan Tate. The warrant was sealed, so no one explained the charges…

Russia is answering its dependence on Starlink on two clocks at once. The Volna Kupol Garant jammer works here and now, but it turns itself into a priority target: a powerful emission and a bulky rig give the complex…

By the evening of 18 July the overnight strike on Wildberries' warehouses was no longer anonymous. Volodymyr Zelensky publicly claimed the attack, describing it as "long-range sanctions" and a response to Russian…

On 16 July, Natalya Kaspersky told RTVI that Russia can no longer catch up with the United States and China in artificial intelligence. She compared the country to someone walking along railway tracks used by trains:…

The collapse of Crimea's holiday season is not just a tourism story. For the first time, the costs of the war are being distributed directly through a mass consumer market: roughly a million cancelled bookings, billions…

The frame. The June raids in Russia's Penza region are the most visible episode of coercive military recruitment since the war began. This is not mobilisation: there is no decree, and in law every man who signed a…

A breakdown of two late-June 2026 Putin appearances — his interview with Pavel Zarubin and his speech at the United Russia party congress. We don't pronounce a verdict of "true/false": intent cannot be fact-checked. We…