After 25 years, can Ukraine turn the corner?
The International Monetary Fund is today widely expected to approve a disbursement of least $1bn for war-torn Ukraine that was delayed for a year amid a domestic political crisis and… Read more »
Category: Russia
Challenging the myth of moral equivalence
The headline: “U.S. investigates potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections.” To those unused to this kind of story, I can imagine that headline, from The Post this week,… Read more »
Russia – poster child for electoral authoritarianism
Russia is the poster child for a type of governance termed electoral, or competitive, authoritarianism, analysts Erik C. Nisbet and Elizabeth Stoycheff write for The Washington Post: These autocratic governments… Read more »
Russia, Iran and Venezuela ‘may democratize by 2020’
The oil crash of 2014-2015 may trigger a wave of democratization in crude-exporting countries across the world, according to research from Renaissance Capital: The emerging market-focused investment bank based its… Read more »
Proscribing pollster, Kremlin ‘takes control of the narrative’
Russia’s only major independent pollster, the Levada Centre, has been designated as a “foreign agent”, the Russian Justice Ministry said on Monday, two weeks ahead of nationwide parliamentary elections. Foreign… Read more »
EU reform could give democracy promotion a lift
It’s time for a pan-European union that encompasses all of the continent’s sovereign countries at different levels of integration, writes Carnegie Europe analyst Cornelius Adebahr: The most basic integration level… Read more »
Putin Vs. Putin?
Russian police briefly detained opposition figure Ilya Yashin (left) on Thursday, two days after he released a report alleging widespread corruption by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, the Organized… Read more »
Russia: a ‘new authoritarian equilibrium’?
President Putin’s United Russia party represents the interests of organised crime, from the lowest rungs of local government to the highest echelons of power, according to an opposition report. The… Read more »
West faces ‘new Cold War’ with democracy under threat?
At the moment, the West is clearly losing the ideological battle for democracy, as two major anti-Western threats have emerged, George Mason University professor Jack A. Goldstone writes for World… Read more »
Russia revives dezinformatsiya to weaken rivals
In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military, The New York Times reports: But he lacks the economic strength… Read more »