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Climate change will shape the future of Russia, and vice versa, regardless of who rules in the Kremlin. The world's largest country is warming faster than Earth as a whole, occupies more than half the Arctic Ocean coastline, and is waging a carbon-intensive war while increasingly isolated from the international community and its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Officially, the Russian government argues that, as a major exporter of hydrocarbons, Russia benefits from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels and from climate change itself, because warming may increase the extent and quality of its arable land, open a new year-round Arctic sea route, and make its harsh climate more livable. Drawing on the collective expertise of a large group of Russia-focused social scientists and a comprehensive literature review, we challenge this narrative. We find that Russia suffers from a variety of impacts due to climate change and is poorly prepared to adapt to these impacts. The literature review reveals that the fates of Russia's hydrocarbon-dependent economy, centralized political system, and climate-impacted population are intertwined and that research is needed on this evolving interrelationship, as global temperatures rise and the international economy decarbonizes in response.

There is an extensive research that explores the reproduction of transnational communities and relations, with a particular focus on locality, identity and culture. However, the existing literature on transnational migration is largely based on the case studies of immigrant communities living in the United States and Western Europe, while not much has been said about the transnational practices of Central Asian labour migrants in Russia, even though Russia is the world’s third largest recipient of labour migrants (after the US and Germany), and Central Asian republics rank among the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. Given the socio-political and cultural differences between Western and post-Soviet societies, it is rather naive to assume that the theoretical perspectives and insights from Western context may be applicable in the illiberal political contexts such as Russia where labour migrants can hardly engage in collective action or transnational activism.A case in point is Uzbek labour migrants in Russia. Unlike Western countries (e.g. US, UK, Germany) where migrants have/had possibilities for establishing relatively functional transnational and diasporic communities, there is little in the way of ‘Uzbek community‘ established in Russia and it is a form of temporary migration where young Uzbeks (mainly men) go to Russia for a few years and return more or less permanently to Uzbekistan after being deported, getting entry ban or due to loss or unavailability of jobs. Although Uzbek labour migrants can hardly be called ‘transmigrants’, in this paper I argue that rapid improvements in technologies of communication (e.g. smartphones and social media) have enabled Uzbek migrants to stay in touch with their origin societies as well as to create some form of permanent, telephone-based ‘Uzbek mahalla‘ (community) in Moscow, which usually gathers around migrants that hail from the same mahalla or village in Uzbekistan. In other words, Uzbek migrants’ transna