Vladimir Putin has now been in power in Russia as president and prime minister for twenty years. The local elections held in September provide an opportunity to evaluate the results… Read more »
Most protests and demonstrations in Russia now appear to be taking place in small and mid-sized cities, sometimes spreading to larger cities and ultimately to Moscow, notes Russia-watcher Paul Goble…. Read more »
Komsomolskaya Pravda has taken the unusual step of reporting on a speech Valery Solovey delivered in the provinces in which he not only denounced the Putin regime for wasting the oil… Read more »
Portraying Ukraine as unstable and on the verge of greater instability has been raised by realist scholars since the early 1990s and continues to dominate much of the pro-Putin western… Read more »
The death of democracy is trumpeted today as loudly as the end of history once was, notes FT analyst Philip Stephens. But while democracies have their problems, it is a… Read more »
The director of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anticorruption Foundation (FBK), Roman Rubanov, was briefly detained and told to return to a law enforcement agency for questioning on October 13,… Read more »
It’s easy to see why Vladimir Putin’s regime appeals to a certain kind of conservative. It has no time for trendy secularism and social liberalism, The Economist’s Edward Lucas notes…. Read more »
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 »
Is Vladimir Putin orchestrating Russian football hooligans as an instrument of hybrid warfare? Putin, not himself averse to machismo, has often empathized with Moscow ultras’ behavior, deliberately cultivating virility as a feature of an assertive… Read more »
Central Asia’s authoritarian governments have rarely found it easy to keep a lid on social discontent or to inoculate their countries against chronic instability in Afghanistan. Ethnic tensions and religious… Read more »