Today is the Mayoral election in Moscow. Updates are below. A guide to the background of the election, and why the election is important, is published at the bottom of this article (click here to jump to it). UPDATES: 7:36 EDT: Navalny polling at 27.39&, Sobyanin at 51.14% with 92.08% of districts reporting. 6:38 EDT: Navalny polling […]
Moscow’s mayoral election is today, and opposition candidate Alexei Navalny is behind in the polls. Digging through some of the latest polling, it appears that Navalny, while he has growing support, also has very high unfavorability ratings among many who think he’s too radical. This assessment is a translation of an article by a political […]
While most eyes have been on the Moscow mayoral race as the September 8 election, a greater drama is playing out in Russia’s regional elections. Across the country, from Zabaikalsky Krai to Arkhangelsk, the fate of United Russia is being decided. After nearly two decades as the prevailing power of a dominant party system, United […]
Vladimir Putin would like Barack Obama to come Russia so they could “talk and discuss the outstanding issues”, but he sees “no disaster”, if that meeting doesn’t happen. This is what the Russian president said in an interview to the “First Channel” and the Associated Press news agency. He explained that the contacts between the […]
Vladimir Putin has stated that Alexei Navalny’s sentence in the Kirovles affair is not at all related to his opposition activity and cites several episodes proving – in the president’s opinion – that there was normal “violation of current law” by Navalny. The New Times has fact-checked Putin’s statement. In an interview with Channel One […]
Apparently it took a while for the Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to figure out what to do to stand out from the chorus of EU politicians who realize more and more clearly with every day what kind of catastrophic consequences for international relations the U.S. attack on Syria, without UN authorization, will have. His […]
The following is a translation in Ria.Ru, one that represents a lot of editorials on the Syrian issue that can be found in the Russian media. It has a few noteworthy characteristics that are common. Curiously, despite the fact that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has specifically stated that there is no “boots on […]
Russia has long been a country identified with secretive and elite security and police agencies; from the Oprichina of Ivan the Terrible, the Okhrana of the Tsar’s, the Cheka and KGB of the Bolsheviks and Soviet Union, to the FSB of today. Due to the multitude of differing agencies, often times with varying levels of […]
For weeks, social media and Russian newspapers have circulated rumors that Navalny’s supporters were planning riots, and other illegal or nefarious actions, in the lead-up and wake of the September 8th mayoral election in Moscow. Most of these reports have been accusations without any supporting evidence. Now, Izvestia, a newspaper with close ties to the […]
This article is a translation from September 2, and is a snapshot in time. Some of the information has changed since this has been published. For instance, there are more American warships heading to the Mediterranean, Congress now looks like it is closer to authorizing strikes, new public opinion polls show a shift in momentum […]
