The North Caucasus is a seething with tension in recent weeks. One area where ethnic tensions are rapidly escalating is in Pugachev. Below is part one of Sasha de Vogel’s investigation into what’s causing the tensions in the town. Part two of her investigation erosion of faith in the State is driving the protests at […]
Few developments speak so well of how far Caucasian dictatorships have come since the grey days of the Soviet Union as the fabulously wealthy and incredibly investment-savvy 15-year-old male heir of Azerbaijan’s ruling family. When he was a mere 11 years old, Heydar Aliyev, the son of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, purchased $44 million in […]
On Tuesday, Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said that he had presented an 80-page report to UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon that conclusively proved that Syrian rebels used sarin gas on March 19th, 2013. According to Churkin, the rebels fired a “Bashar 3 missile” that was armed with sarin gas at the […]
The late Gore Vidal once said that the three saddest words in the English language were Joyce Carol Oates. Now here are the ten saddest: “The CODEL’s visit to Chechnya was facilitated by Steven Seagal.” CODEL stands for Congressional delegation, and the speaker here is the spokeswoman for Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California. […]
All show trials in Russia commence with adjournments, as if to purposefully use as banal legal procedure to interrupt the anticipatory anxiety of seeing the Kremlin face off with one of its enemies. So it was with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with Pussy Riot, and now with the trial of opposition blogger Aleksei Navalny. After all the […]
Although the US-Russian relationship continues to deteriorate in the face of a vengeful Kremlin ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, Vladimir Putin is still pursuing a strategy of influencing—and infiltrating—European political establishments. Given the amount of capital that Russia and her billionaire oligarchs have invested in the continent, this policy is as much defensive […]
Children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov is now the face of Putin’s Magnitsky retaliation law, but in a past life he was an anti-FSB advocate.
In Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré’s most recent spy novel, Dima, the “world’s number one money-launderer” for the Russian mob, befriends two British nationals on holiday in Antigua. He asks them to help him and his family defect to London in exchange for a freshet of juicy intelligence regarding where Russia’s corrupt elite […]
At the World Economic Forum at Davos on Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked the inevitable question about Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian attorney who exposed a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by organized criminals and Russian state officials, only to then be blamed for the crime himself. He died in prison in 2009, […]
