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• Russia leans on drones and dissent-proofing as fuel crisis bites

  Editor’s Note: Russia’s war economy is running short on gasoline at the same moment its military leans harder on North Korean missiles and troops to sustain the fight, and the Kremlin is managing both stories with the same tool: control of the narrative. Four consecutive days of assessments from the Institute for the Study of...

• 2nd Circuit: Church Autonomy Doctrine Bars Defamation Suit Against Church Leaders by Former Priest

  In Belya v. Kapral, (2d Cir., Aug. 18, 2026), a defrocked priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) sued church leaders and church entities for defamation. He claimed that defendants wrongly accused him of forging three letters from church leaders. The letters stated that Belya had been elected Bishop of Miami. Defendants...

• Senate passes Graham sanctions act, shifting Russia pressure from policy to statute

  Editor’s Note: Mandatory sanctions drafting just cleared the Senate, 27 days after the death of the senator whose name it carries. The 86-11 passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on Aug. 7 would put Russia designations and tariff duties on 30-day statutory clocks, tempered by presidential waivers, rate discretion and...

• The cancelled buy-back: Federal Law No. 319-FZ and the departing seller’s option: Compensation at the court’s discretion

  On 4 August 2026, the President of the Russian Federation signed Federal Law No. 319-FZ, which inserts a new Article 20.1 into the Federal Law on Foreign Investments and allows a Russian court to cancel the buy-back option that many departing foreign investors took in place of a market price when they left Russia after...

• Three accounts from one wartime morning in Russia

  Editor’s Note: Three claims about one morning near Omsk reached the public record on Aug. 2, and the Institute for the Study of War relayed all three without reconciling them. Elsewhere in the same assessment ISW cited geolocated footage. For Omsk it did not, and that one distinction carried the whole claim. Cybersecurity, information governance...

• Navigating Chaos, Corruption and Murder in Post-Soviet Russia

  On the latest episode of Bad News, Good Lawyers, host Tom Firestone welcomes Jamison Firestone (no relation), founder of the first independent foreign law firm in post-Soviet Russia. Drawing on stories from his new book, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia, Jamison describes his experiences in early...

• GDPR Audit in 2026: Assessment of Technical and Organisational Measures

  Тoday, personal data simultaneously exists within products, cloud infrastructure, analytics services, CRM systems, correspondence, spreadsheets, artificial intelligence models, and integrations with external services. A GDPR audit should reveal not only what a company declares, but also what actually happens to personal data within its systems, processes, and the day-to-day work of its teams. Why the...

• The week the war reached Russia’s e-commerce supply chain

  Editor’s Note: Warehouses that fill Russia’s online shopping orders burned this week, and those fires say as much about the direction of the war as any map of the front. Between July 15 and July 18, Ukrainian strikes reached e-commerce logistics hubs, shadow fleet tankers, refineries and, by Kyiv’s account, a strategic bomber, while Moscow’s...

• The three silent hours: How Russia’s cyber war targets Ukraine’s newsrooms

  Editor’s Note: Russia’s summer offensive has stalled on the ground, so the Kremlin has shifted weight to the layer where it still moves freely: information. In the first week of July, as missiles hit Kyiv and diplomats gathered for a NATO summit in Turkey, Russian operators kept a parallel campaign running against the systems that...

• The data war over Ukraine: blocked satellites, synthetic footage and a record that fights back

  Editor’s Note: A satellite connection is restricted. Battlefield footage is assessed as artificial-intelligence-generated. A refinery near Moscow burns again. A disputed bus-strike narrative moves ahead of another strike package. In Crimea, fuel is rationed through coupons as exposed supply routes come under pressure. Across three days of reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war, the central contest...

Featured documents

• Traveling to Russia

  I am thrilled to announce that I will be visiting Russia May 12-19 as part of a five-person delegation to discuss the relationship between the news media and the courts. We will be visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk, some 2,200 miles east of Moscow, where we will meet with Russian judges, lawyers, ...

• Russia Considers Improving its Data Protection Law

  The Russian Federation is considering amending the country's data protection law....

• Webinar: ‘Spotlight on Key Labour and Employment Issues – Russia’

  Squire Sanders is presenting a series of webinars focussing on the key labour and employment issues in various countries throughout Europe, Asia Pacific and the United States. On 28 November 2012 at 2.00pm GMT (9.00am EST, 3.00pm CET, 6.00pm MSK), the featured country is Russia.  Irina Golovanova...

• Russia

  The Deputy Finance Minister reportedly announced that a law will be passed by next spring banning transactions in virtual currencies. The law will reportedly provide for criminal penalties against miners of virtual currency, and ban access to exchanges and online stores accepting bitcoin....

• Russia

  At least five bitcoin websites were reportedly blocked by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media pursuant to a court order entered last year....

• Russia Introduces a Right to be Forgotten

  With the aim of keeping pace alongside European practice, on July 13th 2015, the Russian President signed into law a bill amending the Federal Law “On Information, information technologies and on protection of information” No. 149-FZ of 27 July 2006. This law (the “Law”) introduces in Russia the so-...

• A New Wave of CIS Restructurings Poses Unique Challenges

  By Ragnar Johannesen While the CIS nations have recently provided a multitude of sizeable restructuring cases, the region’s dominant force, Russia, has stood up reasonably well to lengthy economic decline, economic sanctions and the collapse of oil and gas prices. There are now signs however, that...

• The future of “clean” sport – the debate rages on

  Much of the build-up to this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio was dominated by the recommendation from the World Anti-Doping Association (“Wada”) that the entire Russian Olympic team should be banned from competing at the Games. This headline-grabbing recommendation was made following the explosive...

• Russian Data Protection Authority Publishes Privacy Policy Guidance

  On 31 July, the Russian data protection authority, Roskomnadzor, issued guidance for data operators on the drafting of privacy policies to comply with Russian data protection law. Russia’s 2006 privacy law – Federal Law No. 152-FZ of 27 July 2006 “On Personal Data” (Personal Data Law) – requires,...

• Putin Signs First Countersanctions Bill into Law; Debate Continues on Second Measure

  Following the imposition of new U.S. sanctions on Russia in April 2018, Russian lawmakers have introduced two draft bills proposing Russian countersanctions against ‘unfriendly’ states, as well as criminalizing compliance with foreign sanctions in Russia. The Countermeasures Bill The first measure, ...