Earlier today, Russian media began to carry an alert from Russians Ministry of Defense that two “ballistic targets” were spotted over the Mediterranean sea. The inference was that this was related to impending U.S. intervention in Syria. Now, the Israeli Defense Force and the Pentagon have confirmed that this was a test of an Israeli […]
Vladimir Pastukhov writes this saucy analogy for the liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. In it he compares Russia’s reaction to Ukraine’s attempts to join the European Union to the actions of a scorned wife as her husband leaves her for a better offer. For more information, see our analysis of the Customs Union and our newest […]
Three leading polling agencies – the All Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), and the Levada Center — agree that the elections in Moscow will take place in one round and that Sergei Sobyanin will win them. Furthermore, Sobyanin will win by a significant margin over the number two candidate, […]
Elections for mayor of Moscow will take place on 8 September. The current campaign is the first one where in the struggle for votes, the candidates have turned to promoting their personas on the Internet along with the traditional methods (advertising in the media and offline campaigning). Lenta.ru has studied the official and unofficial sites […]
Benefits and compensation paid to managers of state companies will be limited to six months of pay. A bill to that effect was submitted to the government by the Ministry of Labor on Wednesday. The initial draft document provided for limiting the size of severance pay at the minimum level currently mandated by the Labor […]
The television channel Moscow 24 has refused to air a campaign ad from Moscow mayoral candidate Nikolai Levichev, Izvestiya reports. As the official refusal states, the commercial does not meet the requirements of election legislation. Alla Alekseyeva, a lawyer for Just Russia announced that the video had not aired, since Moscow 24 believed that the […]
The Russian Federation Security Council is deciding the question of prohibiting the export of RD-180 engines to the USA for the Atlas family of rockets. The Atlas rockets have played an important role in several U.S. space missions, especially since the ending of the NASA Space Shuttle Program. Atlas V rockets launched the Mars rover Curiosity into […]
Russia has begun a new wave of intense crackdowns against migrant workers across the country. Earlier in the month, hundreds or maybe thousands of Vietnamese workers were rounded up and put into a tent-city internment camp. This action, and others like it, has been defended on humanitarian grounds. However, police, often led by Neo-Nazi crowds, […]
Red Square was once again occupied by a group of protesters this weekend marking the 45th anniversary of the arrest of a group of activists and Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Recalling what happened 45 years ago, this protest was also dispersed by police, sparking an official complaint from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. 25 […]
As a former official of the Russian Foreign Ministry, I cannot pass by a turn in our foreign policy without comment. When I worked in the ministry, it was exclusively pragmatic: no ideology, only national interests, expressed primarily in cash. Visited by the young Putin in 2001, the Greeks laughed at him in their newspapers; […]
