President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia received the geopolitical equivalent of manna from heaven when British voters opted to leave the European Union, speeding his long-term goal of weakening the… Read more »
Russia’s liberal opposition has been subjected to all kinds of pressure in the last few months, from leaked clandestine sex tapes to dubious court cases and physical violence. As parliamentary… 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 »
The prospects of democracy in Belarus and Russia may be bleak, but pessimism is no excuse for inaction or apathy, according to Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Vladimir Putin is able… Read more »
For some observers, Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2018 is a foregone conclusion; they see him as a virtual “president-for-life,” secure enough to ignore pressures that might force another leader to… Read more »
With ever-increasing enthusiasm, Russia claims to be the heir to the Soviet Union, and attacks on bronze, granite and plaster Lenins in Ukraine have generally been interpreted here [in… Read more »
Although democracy promotion may have fallen out of favor with the U.S. public [see poll data below], such efforts very much remain in the national interest, argues Larry Diamond, a… Read more »
The EU is set to roll over its Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia for a further six months despite signs of the mood towards Moscow softening in some of the bloc’s member states,… Read more »
In the years since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russians experienced the longest period of freedom in their thousand-year history — and then lost it, notes David E. Hoffman,… Read more »
….. in Kuwait. North Korea has summoned dozens of workers from the Gulf state for staging a mass strike in protest at their working conditions, reports suggest: According to Radio Free Asia,… Read more »
