Understanding the News in Russian

News Russian is its own dialect: passive, attributed, compressed. The good news about the news — it's formulaic. Learn five patterns and headlines stop being walls.

News Speaks in -ся

The -ся passives dominate reporting. You need to read them, not produce them:

According To…

По данным экспертов, цены растут.

According to experts, prices are rising.

Note: Half of all news sentences open with an attribution — learn to skim past it to the claim.

Headline Noun-Chains

Headlines hide verbs inside nouns. Strategy: find the action-noun, unfold it back into a verb.

The News Kit

Common Mistakes

Producing news-style -ся. «Мной сообщается…» — don't. Read the passives; speak in actives.
Reading noun-chains word by word. Unfold the action-noun first; the rest falls into place.
Trusting one headline. По данным одного заголовка… — a language lesson and a media-literacy lesson in one.

What You Can Do Now

You can read short news items, decode headlines, and discuss current events with sources attached — по данным вашего учителя, this is B1 reading in the wild.