Articles

The Interpreter and the Institute of Modern Russia present a special report by Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, and our editor-in-chief, Michael Weiss, on the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, culture and money to achieve foreign policy goals and undermine opponents. In recent […]

Staunton, August 21 – Photographer Aleksandr Belensky has documented what many observers feared: despite spending more than 50 billion US dollars on the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin has left Sochi not the vital place he promised but a ghost town where there are almost no tourists and where much of the infrastructure is already decaying. […]

Staunton, July 29 – The Russian government should reduce the attention it is paying to ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the former Soviet republics – a group he calls “Russian World-II” – and expand its attention to ethnic Russians and those who feel an attachment to Russia elsewhere, a group he calls “Russian World-I,” […]

The following is a translation by The Interpreter of the last blog post, dated 4 July, of Valeriya Novodvorskaya for Ekho Moskvy. Novodvorskaya, a Soviet-era political prisoner and veteran critic of the Kremlin died 12 July in Moscow of complications from a previous surgery. The Russian opposition leader, frequently the target of state media and […]

Andrei Illarionov, an economist and former advisor to the Putin administration, posted this blog at Ekho Moskvy 07:49 on 5 July, possibly before the news of the fleeing of the Slavyansk separatists and Col. Strelkov’s “demobilization order” (ultimately debunked) had reached him (see our Ukrainian Liveblog). Translation by The Interpreter. Operation “Strategic Blackmail” In the […]

Local residents say that several dozen residents of Chechnya, who took part in the fighting in Ukraine and died in the Donetsk region, have been brought back to their homeland in the last few days, giving numbers from 35 to 40-45 dead. The Republic’s security agencies declined to comment on these reports, writes a correspondent […]

The following is a translation of a harrowing account in Gazeta.ru from a French journalist and her cameramen who were taken captive in Slavyansk right at the time Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli and his translator Andrei Mironov were killed in shelling by the roadside. While the account, edited by Elizaveta Antonova, is dated 26 May, […]

Life is a wonderful thing. Once for a whole half hour I could not stop thinking about the best joke of recent times. It’s called “Our friends and (sort of) brothers looking for a trail of Russian products on their shelves.” No, really: a girl describes in detail of how, using barcodes, she was searching […]

The militants from Doku Umarov’s gang were taken out at the end of last year, according to the statement by Director of the Russian FSB Alexander Bortnikov reported by RIA Novosti. “This mission, I told you about, was accomplished at the end of last year,” said Bortnikov. “In due time we will inform the public […]

Vitaly Milonov is a prominent Russian conservative and member of the United Russia party. A staunch advocate of Russia’s controversial ban on “homosexual propaganda,” and he has also repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements, including during a session of the St. Petersburg legislative council in March. He is a prominent critic of the pro-EU Ukrainian movement, and […]