On September 8th, this upcoming Sunday, Moscow will pick its next mayor. No Russian election in many years has attracted as much national and international buzz as this race. Sergei Sobyanin, the acting mayor and a member of Putin’s party United Russia was facing serious political challenge in the upstart blogger-turned-politician Alexei Navalny. Navalny is […]
Original artwork by Dan Nott. We’ve been following the Russian government’s response to the Syrian crisis. We’ve written about how Russia has doubled down on its support of Assad in the wake of the August 21st chemical weapon attack, even going as far as to use false reports about Youtube timestamps to obfuscate the realities […]
Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s candidate for Moscow’s mayor, had a rough few days last weekend. At the end of the week he was given a verbal warning for breaking laws governing campaign literature – laws that it’s very unclear whether Navalny actually broke. Then, over the weekend, Navalny was briefly detained by police, as were […]
Russia’s isolation is growing by the minute. Yesterday I wrote that if the United States and its allies attack Syria, which is likely, then it will be a major blow to the United Nations which will have been sidestepped. Ironically, while Russia and its allies (Syria, Iran, China) often complain that the UN is a […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is often put into the position of defending the Assad regime against UN Security Council actions, and the accusations of the international community. Russia has attempted to place itself between the wrath of the United States and its key allies and the Assad regime by claiming that it is only working […]
Russia has been a staunch supporter of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Since the crisis in Syria began in 2011, Russia has repaired Assad’s attack helicopters, has delivered weapons and munitions to the Syrian regime, and has continuously blocked all actions by the United Nations Security Council, even when those actions only consisted of statements […]
The Kremlin has denied an agreement with Saudi Arabia that would provide Russia with massive arms contracts in exchange for dropping Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Before the denial, however, there was limited reference to the reportedly proposal in most mainstream Russian press outlets. However, one such mention was in MK, a kind […]
Over the last several weeks, racist crowds have reportedly attacked markets in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, often with the assistance of the police. Without cause, immigrants selling fruit in marketplaces have been beaten or arrested, and their produce destroyed, often before they are even given an opportunity to present any documents that could prove […]
Few pieces of graffiti are more famous than Dmitri Vrubel’s My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. The painting, sometimes called Fraternal Kiss, adorned the Berlin Wall between 1990 and 2009. It recreated a picture taken in 1979, on the anniversary of the founding of the Communist German Democratic Republic in East Germany. At that celebration, two men, Leonid […]
Vera Kichanova, Slon.ru journalist; a municipal deputy for the South Tushino district; and [Kichanova’s] companions were beaten at Kamchatka bar. Some female guests at the bar, and then the men in their group, were unhappy with the way Vera’s friends looked and decided to demonstrate their dislike of homosexuals, not only by word but by […]
