Tag: Russia

Kremlin advancing political agenda by crushing dissent

     

The Russian government has created a series of often ill-defined laws that threatened fines or even jail time for broad categories of banned content. The authorities have thrown the book… Read more »

How to hit Russia where it hurts

     

Western democracies need  a long-term strategy to ramp up economic pressure on Putin’s Russia, argues Peter Harrell, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who served… Read more »

Democracies ‘outgunned’ in fight to counter Russian disinformation

     

The Russian government recently launched a new disinformation campaign – aimed at deflecting blame for a possible chemical attack in Syria, where Russia is fighting to prop up the brutal… Read more »

Smart sanctions should target Kremlin kleptocrats

     

More than 1,000 people were detained at anti-corruption protests across Russia on Monday, AP reports: The OVD-Info group, which tracks police detentions and posts the names of the detainees on… Read more »

Why the West must confront Putin

     

Recent events have only strengthened hedge-fund manager Bill Browder’s case against the Kremlin, a prominent Moscow-based journalist writes. In order to advance the now-celebrated Magnitsky Act, Browder approached the Helsinki… Read more »

Russian ‘mood swing’? High level of dissent ‘points to trouble for Putin’

     

Economic conditions for most Russians are about to get much worse, say analysts [HT: Paul Goble]. That makes grim reading for the Kremlin alongside news that Vladimir Putin’s personal support hit… Read more »

Putin’s conservative rhetoric fueling ‘demoskepticism’?

     

Does conservative support for such illiberal rulers as Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán indicate growing “demoskepticism” on the right? Some conservatives now dismiss policies that are infused with… Read more »

West’s Iron Curtain ‘would be most effective tool against Putin’s kleptocracy’

     

There is a major difference between former Soviet leaders and senior Russian officials today, including Russian President Vladimir Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov, whose families are abroad, former… Read more »

Russia lacks ability to roll back post-1990 democratic revolution

     

The West is in crisis because of European weakness, not Russian strength, says analyst Walter Russell Mead. Europe’s weakness has provided Vladimir Putin with opportunities to promote Russian power by… Read more »