Tag: Lilia Shevtsova

The Kremlin’s global challenge: paradoxes of Russian-Western relations

     

Russia appears today as an assertive power ready to weaken international norms and kick over the global chessboard, notes the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. Even… Read more »

West & Russia on brink of new Cold War?

     

There’s a fundamental flaw in the Russian propaganda narrative about the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the U.K. earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky writes:… Read more »

Paradise Papers highlight kleptocracy’s corrosive impact on democracy

     

  A huge leak of financial documents revealed by a group of about 100 media organizations on Sunday provided deep insights into some of the mechanisms used by top politicians and celebrities… Read more »

Putin the winner? West’s new pragmatism ‘a shot in the arm’ for Russia

     

  Having failed to find a workable solution for the post-Crimea situation, and bogged down by its own problems, the West seems poised to drop its “liberal world order” mantras,… 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 »

How central Europe’s high hopes gave way to creeping authoritarianism

     

The central European states were the vanguards of communism’s collapse in the late 1980s, prompting a sense of inevitability about democracy’s benign coming, reinforced by the diverse figures who stepped… Read more »

Learn the lessons of Russia’s creeping authoritarianism

     

A few hours before Vladimir Putin gave his 2014 new year’s speech, a shadowy group calling itself Shaltai Boltai — the Russian for Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme character —… Read more »

Hybrid Putinism: ‘a mafia state with a totalitarian society’?

     

The question of what constitutes democracy did not have time to be hashed out in the Russian public sphere before that sphere began disappearing a decade and a half ago,… Read more »

Putin’s Master Plan: Russian autocracy ‘will always threaten Ukraine’

     

Vladimir Putin is “a calculating master of geopolitics with a master plan to divide Europe, destroy NATO, re-establish Russian influence in the world, and most of all, marginalize the United… Read more »