Category: Eurasia

Ukraine’s former leader ‘paid bribes of $2 billion’ – $1.4 million for each day in office

     

  Ukraine’s former president paid bribes worth at least $2 billion (£1.4 billion) during his four years in office – amounting to almost $1.4 million for every day he was… Read more »

Azerbaijan court frees campaigning journalist Khadija Ismayilova

     

  A top Azerbaijan investigative journalist, in jail since December 2014, has been freed on the order of the country’s supreme court, the BBC reports: Khadija Ismayilova‘s seven-and-a-half year sentence… Read more »

Kremlin to fund patriotic ‘anti-extremist’ films

     

  Russia’s Ministry of Culture is looking to produce films to spread Russian values, celebrate the country’s history and tackle “crime, terrorism and extremism,” Newsweek’s Damien Sharkov writes: The Ministry… Read more »

Why the experts get Russia wrong

     

Why has divining Russia’s political future been so hard? asks Timothy Frye, the Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. It is a challenge not because of the supposedly… Read more »

A Strategy for Democratic Renewal

     

Democracy is being challenged today as never before since the end of Cold War, notes Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy. Freedom House has recorded ten consecutive… Read more »

New fault-lines over moral matters at UN

     

A traditionalist coalition comprising autocratic states like Russia alongside the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which groups 57 mainly Muslim lands, has been rallying its forces against LGBT rights, The Economist notes:… Read more »

Reconciliation, mobilizing civil society key to Ukraine’s future

     

The European Union and the Ukrainian government have launched the “Association4U/Association for Ukraine and for You” joint project, which aims to support the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. The… Read more »

Fact-checking in a post-fact world

     

Do you care whether all the facts in a newspaper article are true? If so — what could convince you that they are or are not? A friend? A neutral… Read more »

‘Fascistic’? Russia’s foreign policy in the Putin era

     

The worldview of Russia’s ruling elite can be understood within a “fascist framework” for geopolitics, argues Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, who asserts that fascism is a framework which is… Read more »