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CNN on situation with HIV in Russian and on our harm reduction work in Moscow

The government refuses to acknowledge that it isn't supporting more than a million people infected by HIV/AIDS.

Georgiy Vanunts, reporter of the Russian media outlet FurFur visited AMOC Center run by the Rainbow group in Amsterdam, which has one of the oldest and one of the most appealing safe injection rooms in the world.

In Russia, a punitive Soviet approach to drug users is still in place. But a new generation of activists is ready to challenge it.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation distributes sterile needles to people who use drugs on the streets of Moscow. Now they are facing the Ministry of Justice which is accusing them of being “foreign agents”. Ivan Varentsov explains the case.

“H.I.V. is not a personal problem, it is a social problem, and it should be solved as a social problem,” Elena Plotnikova, who works for the foundation, said as she handed out supplies. “The basic attitude of the government is: You made a bad decision and we are not going to help you.”

Apathy and political expedience have shaped the Kremlin’s frozen-in-time views on the virus. Will officials finally act to prevent a national health crisis?

Epidemiologists have developed the means to stop HIV in its tracks, but Russia is barely listening

This week, an HIV epidemic has been officially declared in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where the health department estimates 1 out of every 50 residents is a carrier of the virus. The government has been hesitant to recognize that Russia is experiencing one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics.

“I had to abandon home, family and friends to a place where nobody was waiting for me.” Former injectable drug user Ivan spoke to me in Ukraine’s capital of Kiev late in 2014.