On March 6, the Ukrainian news site 24tv.ua published an interview of Sergei Stepanov, a recently-released Ukrainian POW, with journalist Yevgeniya Mazur. The account was also published by the Krivoy Rog city site. Stepanov, who was severely wounded, was released to be treated in a hospital 15 days after being taken prisoner at the Krasny Partizan […]
Alexey Navalny, the opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger, has posted a piece on his blog about the murder of Boris Nemtsov, his fellow coordinator of protest marches and other projects challenging the Putin regime. He was unable to attend his colleague’s funeral today because authorities wouldn’t give him leave from serving a 15-day jail sentence […]
Staunton, February 2 — The revival of Kremlinology, of relying on a variety of indirect indications of who is closer to the top leader and who may be opposed to him, is “a bad sign,” Ekaterina Schulmann says, not only because of what it says about the increasingly closed nature of Russian politics but also […]
Russia’s well-regarded Ekho Moskvy radio station, which has long attempted to maintain political independence despite the increasingly hypoxic climate for dissenting media and pressure from shareholders (the station is owned by Gazprom-Media), has today, facing an acute crisis since last month when the station received a warning from Roskomnadzor (the Russian media regulator) and an intervention […]
Rossiyskaya Gazeta (RG.ru), the Russian state newspaper of record, has published an interview with Anatoly Kucherena, the lawyer of Edward Snowden, titled Snowden Awaits his Fiancé: Anatoly Kucherena Describes How the Most Mysterious American Lives and Works. The interview was conducted by Boris Yamshanov, a journalist who has authored a number of articles on legal […]
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 […]
