Putin’s Crimea – no vacation
Human rights and freedom of expression in Crimea today are more tightly restricted than in Russia, where the Kremlin cannot exert the same level of control. For Russian President… Read more »
Category: Eurasia
Russian rights defender attacked in Chechnya
A mob of unidentified people attacked a leading Russian human rights defender on March 16, 2016, in Chechnya, Human Rights Watch said today: The attackers hit Igor Kalyapin, head of… Read more »
Is Russia’s National Character Authoritarian?
The revival of authoritarianism in Russia cannot be explained in terms of differences in deep attitudes toward free markets or democracy, notes Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller. It’s wrong to… Read more »
Money and media problems marred elections in 2015
Flawed and failed elections around the world last year were manipulated through vote rigging and corruption, intimidation, and violence, according to new evidence from the Electoral Integrity Project: Political… Read more »
Transatlantic Solidarity Under Stress
New strategic surprises will continue to challenge the paradigms on which the transatlantic security partnership has been built. The forthcoming NATO Warsaw Summit is expected to be critical in enacting… Read more »
US ‘deeply troubled’ by Russian moves to ban democracy group
Russian authorities have launched investigations against an activist of Russia’s Parnas opposition party, Natalya Pelevina, RFE/RL reports. Russia’s Investigative Committee said the opposition leader being checked for her role in… Read more »
Speculation grows over D.C. death of Putin propagandist
A prominent practitioner of information warfare and ex-aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin did not die of a heart attack in a Washington, D.C. hotel room last year as… Read more »
‘Unprecedented’ pressure on Russia’s opposition, as NDI deemed undesirable
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has declared the activities of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs to be undesirable in the latest of a series of measures designed to… Read more »
The Obama Doctrine: advancing democracy, but….
President Barack Obama is a democratic internationalist, he tells The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, but experience has also taught him to temper his idealism with a pragmatic, realist approach to foreign… Read more »
Russia’s Bad Example
For decades Russia remained a country without an ideology to export. Now Putin’s Russia has realized that it can capitalize on its foreign policy goals of sowing democratic… Read more »