Corey Flintoff

On Sunday, Russian voters will choose members of the lower house of parliament. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the last such elections. They say they are too afraid to protest now.

Russia is racing to build a bridge to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula it annexed in 2014. The strategically vital project is beset by charges of near-slave labor for workers and engineering concerns.

Russia recently introduced a new warship in the Black Sea, an area of heightened tension since Russia's seizure of Crimea two years ago. NPR's Corey Flintoff was invited on board.

The possibility of the entire Russian team being banned from next month's Rio Olympics increased Thursday. A court of arbitration upheld a specific ban on Russian track and field athletes attending the games, after allegations of the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs.

European soccer officials say they will kick Russia out of the European Championship if there is any repeat of the violence involving Russian fans during the rest of the competition, currently underway in France.

Olympic officials are investigating allegations that Russia ran a state-sponsored doping operation at the 2014 Sochi games and are threatening to ban Russia from the Olympics in Rio.

U.S. prosecutors have opened an investigation into allegations that the Russian government ran a doping program that produced winners in several recent Olympic Games, The New York Times reports.

The woman, Nadezhda Savchenko, was a military pilot captured during the war in Eastern Ukraine, and her case has become a symbol of the conflict between the two countries.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fled to Russia when fighting began in 2014. The welcome they received has cooled as Russia's economy sags, and very few have been granted formal refugee status.

In Russia, relatively few people seem to be following the U.S. presidential election campaigns closely, but most people know the names of the front-runners.