Category: Russia

A Difficult Balance: Putin’s Regime and the Ideological Market

     

Like the Soviet nomenklatura, the Putin elite is dangerously isolating itself from the Russian people, setting the stage for a populist challenge against its privileges, says Yevgeny Gontmakher, the Moscow… Read more »

How to ensure Kremlin remembers Boris Nemtsov

     

Last month, thousands of people held rallies and vigils in cities across Russia to mark the second anniversary of the murder of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the… Read more »

Lithuania’s struggle for freedom continues

     

NATO’s European members have increased defense spending for the first time in seven years, Euronews reports: The hike was driven by Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent Estonia, three… Read more »

Ukraine’s soft-power struggle faces hard reckoning

     

When “little green men” invaded Crimea in the spring of 2014, Russian media went into overdrive, smearing Ukraine’s Euro-revolution as a “fascist coup d’état,” POLITICO reports: A group of professors and… Read more »

Boris Nemtsov: The Man Who Was Too Free

     

In the shadow of the red brick Kremlin walls, an informal shrine marks the spot and the memory of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic,… Read more »

Kremlin hopes for ‘Post-West’ world order recede

     

Europeans are waking up to the fact that Russia is trying to do by peaceful means what the Soviet Union once threatened by violent ones: overthrow democratic governments, James Kirchik… Read more »

Democratic modernity ‘not enough’ for CEE

     

The illiberal, populist drift in Central and Eastern Europe is a consequence of disillusion with the European Union as well as historical legacies, says a prominent analyst. “These countries had… Read more »

Russia’s ‘managed thaw’: events suggest Putin not all-powerful

     

This week, two political prosecutions in Russia were quashed — to much applause, notes Pavel Chikov (left), a leading human rights lawyer. But it’s too early to talk about positive… Read more »