“Young silly girls” that’s how Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov referred to Ukrainian Femen movement activists Oxana Shachko, Anna Deda and Irina Fomina. The three were sentenced to 5-12 days jail for appearing topless at an election site during the presidential vote in Russia on Sunday and imitating an attempt to steal the ballot box, which Putin had used to vote earlier in the day.

It was the first time Deda and Fomina had been in jail.

One wouldn’t be able to tell it was Fomina’s first ever protest the night before, when the women gathered to practice in a hostel room overlooking the Moscow river. I had never covered this intimate process of preparation for an act of protest before. Moreover, it was the first time I met the activists, and I barely knew their leader Anna Hutsol. That left me slightly confused.

The day before the elections, Hutsol replied to my request to come and photograph them, saying she would most likely agree. All day long, in my head I was going through pictures of Femen shot by Alessandro Bianchi in Italy, Gleb Garanich in Ukraine, photos that had won at the World Press Photo and POYi, trying to make mine different. My fears about repeating what had been shot already proved groundless, thanks to the interior of the Soviet-style apartment made into a hostel.

Hotsol called me to say the hostel only allowed guests until 23:00. The complicated thing was that the FIS Snowboard World Cup, which I was covering that day, did not end until 21:00. By 21:40, I was at the address Hutsol had sent me. A few male hostel guests lazily sat in front of a TV set in their sweat pants, clueless about what was being prepared next door.

The host, who had no idea about the organization the good-looking young women belonged to, asked them to take photos of themselves in the interiors of the hostel and write a review about it. She wanted to use them for advertisements in the future. We laughed as we found the offer funny given Femen’s growing popularity in Russia and abroad.

Deda sat at her computer preparing a press release. Fomina covered herself with a blanket and watched euronews. Hutsol came back from a local store 10 minutes later. After a brief discussion the rehearsal began.

The protest involved an imitation of stealing the ballot bin Putin was going to use, in a metaphor of votes being stolen from Russians in Putin’s favor.

Showing no intimidation whatsoever, the girls took off their shirts and Shachko, who is an artist, wrote on their chests “Kremlin rats,” “I am stealing for Putin,” “Thief.” The last word, one of the activists carried on her back, came from a Russian-English dictionary.

Fifteen minutes later, when the writing was done, they started practicing taking off their clothes. Fomina came first in every round. During the actual protest, however, Fomina lost timing to Shachko, who was the first to get to the ballot bin and who also got the longest jail term.

We had to keep the noise down, so we whispered through the rest of the rehearsal. The women even practiced their actions in case they were held by security officers. Next, they studied the location of the election site on Yandex maps.

The success of the protest depended on many factors. The site was guarded by all possible security forces, from regular police to Federal Security Service officers, who seemed to make up a quarter of all present at the site. Some three minutes before Femen appeared, about an hour after Putin left, the entrance security check was eased.

Journalists walked around, occasionally catching random shots. And that’s where it all began….

I don’t remember a time when Moscow hasn’t been flooded with them – migrants from Central Asia.

When I moved here in 1997 they were already here. They had started appearing more than 20 years ago, the time when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Some fled civil wars, but more often they were escaping the awful economic situation in their homelands. Not exactly an escape, but they came to make some money, leaving their families at home. The economic situation in Russia even now isn’t enviable, at the beginning of the 1990’s it was woeful, but none the less better than there.

Muscovites have got used to living with them, used to regarding them as low qualified workers, as street sweepers and lorry loaders, cheap muscle on building sites. People are used to calling them “churki” and “sheep” and not finding those words in any way offensive.

Muscovites are generally not very tolerant people towards aliens, and aren’t very fond of newcomers from the varied different regions of the Russian federation, or the Caucasus or from Central Asia. But only the latter group has it become habitual to offend in public.

When I started to shoot this story I saw the following scene: two women arguing about a dog belonging to one of them that was swimming with children in a river one hot July day. In the same place migrants from Tajikistan were swimming, they were about half of the bathers present. The women were shouting and arguing for a long time about the hygiene of the dog. Bystanders became involved and eventually sided with the dog owner, arguing that it was permissible since there were already several “darkies” swimming in the same place, so the water could hardly be considered clean. The darkies, deeply tanned only on their necks and forearms, listened silently and continued swimming and didn’t pay any attention to what was happening. Everybody is used to it, but I felt deeply ashamed.

That’s what I wanted to photograph, but it seemed impossible. The unpleasantness of locals to the immigrants is an intangible, a mentality ingrained as part of the status quo, easy to seem unremarkable and by its nature unnoticed. However there are so many aspects to this relationship that reflect a multitude of issues confronting Russia at the beginning of the 21st century.

Those who work with migrants think there is somewhere between 2 and 3 million central Asians working in and around Moscow. The Russian authorities put the figure at just under a million. The discrepancy in figures may be a problem of paperwork; most citizens of the former CIS don’t need a visa to come to the Russian capital. They do need a work permit, but these can be obtained by one means or another and so become currency on the shady side of Russia’s balance sheet. Working without the correct paperwork can be expensive in bribes. Being uncountable is both profitable and helps to conceal the scale involved. A huge hole in the demographic curve of Russia, a result of the shock tactics of conversion to a free market in the 1990’s, means there is a shortage of young adults coming into the working age bracket. Russia’s hydrocarbon driven economy needs diversification, but the labor resources for development projects is lacking. The migrants come, to fill the gap.

I came across difficulties in places where I hadn’t expected. For example in their own lands they are incredibly curious and happily open to journalists – no problem to chat and take pictures. But here they feel hostility; they close up and don’t let you establish any contact. Their only request was to be left in peace. “We just came here to work” and “everything’s okay with us” – was their standard reply. They thought I was working for the police, the migration service, or a bureaucrat, seemingly forgetting there are people who are genuinely interested in how they live and the problems they face.

Before I started work on this project I had no idea how deep it went. It’s almost impossible to show the scale when you start investigating questions of their living environment, work conditions, motivation for migration, xenophobia, and corruption across the Russian institutions that make life almost slavish.

The majority of migrants I talked with want to, at some point, leave Russia and in general only see Russia as a way to make money. There is a regular flow at the train stations for the three day ride to central Asia, those who have made enough, or had enough, passing the new replacements arriving. Belongings are loaded onto the passenger seats, the herds of checkered bags offering little safety from border guards who prey on the returnees, knowing they will have to pass through, their documents doubtfully in order.

Aside from the general background level hostility from the man in the street, there is a worrying growth in nationalist extremism. 2010’s riot in central Moscow brought unexpected focus to these racial tensions. Race related homicide is not uncommon. The central Asians make easy targets due to their appearance and Muslim faith. Islamic separatists from the Caucasus have given an obvious argument to those wishing to single out Muslims, in this country of renewed Orthodox faith, remembered and encouraged since the atheist Soviet era. Maintaining an out-group is politically expedient in times of crisis or election, but it requires a fine balance to keep it in check given the necessity of this labor source.

Religious differences make more personal tragedies for those from countries with conservative values untenable in Moscow. Maintaining a traditional central Asian family structure is difficult for the constantly moving migrants. For the many women migrants a child born in Moscow can mean the end of employment. To return home risks being an outcast since the children are often born out of wedlock, unforgivable in local custom, so abandonment is frequent. I visited a hospice for single migrant mothers, in a partially finished commercial building on the outskirts of the capital. Even in this rare outpost of charity there is resentment – the well-educated doctors of the clinic asked me “why should we look after them, teach them and their children, when we often refuse other residents of the same suburb.”

Keeping this source of labor flowing over the coming years is imperative for Russia, but for the present authorities it is not convenient to address, or convenient to not address the problem of rights. Despite the problems the trains keep on arriving, filled with “them”.

(View a large format showcase of images here)

Like other mourners, Putin walked silently past a line of coffins and placed red carnations beside them at a memorial ceremony in the stadium where Lokomotiv Yaroslavl played, about 250 km (150 miles) north of Moscow.

Local security officials said more than 100,000 people attended the service in Yaroslavl, despite heavy rain.

“We’ve lost so many young people … I am a father, it’s difficult for me to talk about it,” said a middle-aged man, tears rolling down his cheeks. “And look, the weather is crying as well.”

Only two people survived Wednesday’s crash, which killed 36 players and team officials and seven crew when the plane came down on a river bank in a village near Yaroslavl shortly after takeoff. The cause has not yet been determined.

Grieving fans have turned the team’s stadium into something of a shrine, leaving flowers, candles and team scarves there.

Some fans have criticized a decision to continue a Kremlin-sponsored conference in the stadium the day after the crash.

Memorial services were also held on Saturday in the Belarussian capital Minsk, where the team had been flying for a match, as well as in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the Latvian capital Riga and the Czech capital Prague.

Among international victims were three Czech world champions, a Swedish goalkeeper, a Slovak forward and a Canadian coach. Many had played around the world, including in North America’s National Hockey League.

It was Russia’s eighth fatal plane crash this year and has highlighted mounting air safety problems.

Medvedev called for urgent measures to improve safety when he visited the crash site on Thursday before attending the conference at the team stadium.

He demanded a rapid reduction in the number of domestic airlines and said Russia may have to buy foreign aircraft to improve safety.

Opposition parliamentarians have called for the resignation of Transport Minister Igor Levitin and the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, has asked him to address it on September 20.

(Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin occupied the nation’s TV screens while reports of his bravado in fighting forest wildfires littered the media. The rest of the country were dead on their feet, choking with smoke as they fought the disaster.

Unable to depend upon Putin, government authority or new luxury equipment for assistance, locals grew weary as they defended their houses using an arsenal of tractors, farm equipment and shovels.

Some relied on their prayers.

A priest blessed firefighters in the village of Berestyanka before they continued on. Local residents conducted religious services asking God for rain to prevent new wildfires like the one that partially destroyed the village of Kriusha on August 5.

About one hundred people, mostly elderly women, knelt asking God to forgive their sins. They then followed an Orthodox priest during a procession through the village.

As they walked, the procession appeared to dissolve into heavy white smog, which had shrouded the settlement. Only their prayers were heard. These words drifted out from behind the screen of smoke “You, God Almighty, ask for our houses, people living there and property inside: bless, sanctify with a holy cross, save us from fire.”

The local church was burnt. Though residents could only meet with the priest once a week, they still believe and trust in God.