The last two years have been rather tough for the Russian government’s main English-language propaganda outlet, RT. Following Russia’s illegal and nearly-universally-condemned annexation of the Crimean peninsula, RT anchor Liz Wahl, then anchor and correspondent Sara Firth, quit in protest of what they called “propaganda” which they were forced to spread in order to cover […]
The Eurasian Economic Union – an economic alliance of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan – is expected to become effective on January 1, 2015. After the events in Ukraine it can be assumed that in the future the Eurasian Union will expand by another neighbor of Russia. On December 24 a regular meeting of the Supreme […]
To begin with, Barack Obama’s planned summit with Vladimir Putin next month in St. Petersburg, in advance of the upcoming Group of 20 confab in that city, was not really “cancelled,” as has been widely reported. It was “postponed,” a semantic distinction with a difference, even in the style of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger diplomacy which now characterizes […]
Last Thursday, Sergei Magnitsky was convicted of tax evasion. The only problem was he was not there to hear the verdict read. Magnitsky was killed in Moscow’s Butyrka prison in 2009, likely as a result of beatings and a lack of medical treatment. His crime was uncovering a $230 million tax fraud involving members of […]
New polls show that the share of Russians saying they trust President Vladimir Putin has declined even among those who say they will vote for him and the share who say they will do so is now under 50 percent.
A recent opinion poll found that 46% of Russians admired Stalin; they were indifferent to Brezhnev and really disliked Gorbachev.
Your daily roundup. ON MY MIND One has to wonder why Russia decided to so flagrantly violate a ceasefire in Syria when the terms of the truce were so clearly in Moscow’s interests. Is Vladimir Putin’s regime simply intent on humiliating and taunting the West? With the recent all-out assault on Aleppo, which resulted in […]
Natalya Kasperskaya, a prominent Russian IT entrepreneur and president of the InfoWatch group of companies said at a business conference today that the government “really was talking about decrypting and analyzing all Internet traffic of Russian citizens” and this was a good thing. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund exposed her own business interest in selling DPI (deep packet inspection) software to the government.
A Pussy Riot-style scandal has broken out in Tatarstan after a young woman danced in front of a mosque there in what many thought were excessively revealing clothes.
A Russian blogger says President Vladimir Putin has plans for a “global” transformation of the Russian political landscape that will leave Russia without a president but have Putin become head of a State Council.
