Russia’s ‘hollow men’ locked in dynamic of failure
Far from formidable, Vladimir Putin and those around him in the Kremlin have made themselves prisoners of the past, argues Andrew Wood, an associate fellow of Chatham House and a… Read more »
Category: Russia
How Putin’s Praetorian guard will put down mass protests
It has been years since Russia’s protest movement showed much moxie, sending tens of thousands onto the streets of Moscow for raucous demonstrations against electoral fraud and Vladimir Putin’s third term as… Read more »
Russia’s growing intolerance of dissent
Today, at Moscow’s eminent House of Cinematography, pro-Kremlin protesters attacked the award ceremony of an annual student competition organized by the civil society group Memorial, writes Tanya Lokshina of Human… Read more »
Russia’s internet censor enlists China’s Firewall expertise
For an authoritarian government looking to tighten control of an unruly internet, who better to call than the architect of China’s “great firewall”? That was the thinking of Konstantin Malofeev, a multimillionaire… Read more »
Mapping the New Battlespace of Information
In the digital age, social media can become a weapon of disinformation and sophisticated propaganda can shape important policy debates. Russia has been an early adopter of these techniques and… Read more »
Putin experiencing ‘the impotence of omnipotence’
Many of the apparent contradictions in Russia today can be explained by the fact that Vladimir Putin and his regime have entered what political scientist Guilliermo O’Donnell called “the impotence of… Read more »
Lawmakers call for Nemtsov killers to face justice
Over the past decade and a half, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been an economic dynamo and a basket case, an imperfect democracy and a tightening tyranny, notes Foreign Affairs. The case of Boris Nemtsov provides… Read more »
Teflon Putin: corrupt but secure?
The biggest surprise about the Russian reaction to the Panama Papers leaks came in the form of a poster that depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as the drug-addled protagonist played by Johnny Depp in… Read more »
Civil society in post-Soviet space: legitimacy, linkage and learning
“Partly free” countries in the post-Soviet space must fight even harder now to protect growing civil societies, argues Orysia Lutsevych, the manager of the Ukraine Forum in London-based think tank… Read more »
Will the Putin regime crumble?
Yes, says Stephen Sestanovich, the George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a board member of the National Endowment for… Read more »