Tuesday, February 17, 2015, will mark the 365th consecutive day of The Interpreter’s “Ukraine Live” coverage. To mark the occasion Matt Sienkiewicz, Assistant Professor of Communication and International Studies at Boston College, has written an analysis of the merits of liveblogging. Two poles dominate our current information environment. On one extreme there is the developing […]
There are things you cannot eliminate by changing the regime, boycotting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, or imposing international sanctions. These are human cruelty, indifference to others, and ignorance. In Russia, cruelty, indifference and ignorance are commonplace. Some people get used to them, others end up tolerating them. You will always come across someone who will find pleasure in humiliating, offending […]
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 […]
Earlier this month, EU finance ministers gave their approval for Latvia to become the eighteenth member of the Euro in January 2014. It seems counterintuitive that the country of two million people would want to enter the perpetually distressed and recession-stricken economic zone. But for Latvia it has a variety of benefits, not the least […]
Since being released from prison following his five-year sentence for embezzlement charges, Alexey Navalny’s campaign for mayor of Moscow has come under intense scrutiny, both from pro-Kremlin and oppositional quarters. Below, Interpreter translator Catherine A. Fitzpatrick weighs some of the controversies surrounding Navalny’s nationalism, his past comments about minorities and foreigners and his plan for barring […]
The sentencing of Alexey Navalny and Petr Ofitserov on July 18 had two immediate and simultaneous effects: in Moscow, a protest of several thousand swarmed a major intersection near the Kremlin, and in Kirov, prosecutors abruptly appealed the defendants’ arrest pending their appeal. Could it be that the prosecutors had responded to the demands of […]
[Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov met on April 27 with their employees who have been included in the so-called Magnitsky List. The list includes 18 judges and representatives of law-enforcement and other government agencies whom American authorities believe are complicit in the death in pre-trial detention at Matrosskaya Tishina Prison of […]
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 […]
Just as I was getting used to thinking of Cyprus as the Mediterranean clime where Hezbollah agents go to spy on ‘the Jews’ and Rami Makhlouf is granted citizenship, I awaken to the fact that future of the eurozone may in fact depend on the good graces of Vladimir Putin. An island nation with a […]
The late Christopher Hitchens liked to say of any outspoken homophobe from the Beltway to the Bible Belt that “sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to […]
