Few developments speak so well of how far Caucasian dictatorships have come since the grey days of the Soviet Union as the fabulously wealthy and incredibly investment-savvy 15-year-old male heir of Azerbaijan’s ruling family. When he was a mere 11 years old, Heydar Aliyev, the son of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, purchased $44 million in […]
Boris Nemtsov has occupied many roles in post-Soviet Russia, both in government and in the parallel polis that is oppositional politics. He was first elected governor of Nizhny Novgorod, whose successful economic reforms in that region carved a political pathway that would ultimately take him into the deputy premiership under the Yeltsin government. Nemtsov has […]
The late Gore Vidal once said that the three saddest words in the English language were Joyce Carol Oates. Now here are the ten saddest: “The CODEL’s visit to Chechnya was facilitated by Steven Seagal.” CODEL stands for Congressional delegation, and the speaker here is the spokeswoman for Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California. […]
Drawing on some of the material first translated and published at The Interpreter, I’ve made another attempt to explain why, in spite of the United States’ dogged efforts, the Kremlin is not abandoning its position on Syria — if anything, it’s digging in further. My column at NOW Lebanon this week: The United States pretends to […]
Within the space of the last 24 hours, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have shed more light on the steady and unchanged nature of the Russian-Syrian military relationship. First, the Times reported that Russia has sent advanced Yakhont anti-ship missiles to Syria “outfitted with an advanced radar that makes them more […]
Today’s announcement that a US “spy” working in the American embassy in Moscow had been captured by the FSB has raised more than a few eyebrows about not only the details of this case (the alleged spy’s Get Smart paraphernalia) but also the timing. I asked Professor Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian intelligence, what […]
The photographs showing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry smiling and slapping palms with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are being circulated by many Syrians opposed to the Bashar al-Assad’s regime as visual obituaries of their cause. Weren’t these men supposed to be on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict? And why does the Herman Munster-ish Lavrov […]
Vladislav Surkov, the architect of Putin’s “sovereign democracy” idea, and now the deputy prime minister for economic modernization, gave talk at the London School of Economics yesterday in which he said that the Kremlin “beat” the Russian opposition after the December 2011 Duma election protests: Do you really think that the old system collapsed after the protests in December 2011? […]
The launch of an online magazine dedicated to translating Russian-language news articles, editorials and blogs seems at once long overdue and well-timed. Since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, Russia has undergone such a frenzy of noteworthy developments that the Western press has often struggled to keep up with them, much less make […]
So far, and in spite of the American media’s best effort to acquaint its audience with a country called Chechnya (and the Czech embassy’s best efforts to remind that audience of the excellence of Bohemian pilsner), there is little evidence linking the Boston marathon bombings to any jihadist organization or cell headquartered in the North Caucasus. CNN cited an […]
