The purpose of this paper is to study certain Russian ‑sja verbs, generally referred to as reflexive verbs, but that are difficult to account for in terms of reflexivity and its corollary, intransitivity. The main issue under discussion is how a morpheme can be considered as detransitive with certain verbs and also be used to derive new intransitive verbs from intransitive verbs (belet’sja, stučat’sja, svetit’sja, dymit’sja). The article also deals with the question of transitive verbs having a counterpart in –sja with no or little change of meaning such as kusat’ ~ kusat’sja (to bite, to sting). Then the article dwells on the diachronic side of the question to underline the fact that intransitivity has not always been a feature of –sja and that in comtemporary Russian there still exists ‑sja verbs governing the accusative (though not many). From all this, we conclude that the traditional frameworks of reflexivity/intransitivity cannot properly account for those verbs.