On September 8th, this upcoming Sunday, Moscow will pick its next mayor. No Russian election in many years has attracted as much national and international buzz as this race. Sergei Sobyanin, the acting mayor and a member of Putin’s party United Russia was facing serious political challenge in the upstart blogger-turned-politician Alexei Navalny. Navalny is […]
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, […]
Original artwork by Dan Nott. We’ve been following the Russian government’s response to the Syrian crisis. We’ve written about how Russia has doubled down on its support of Assad in the wake of the August 21st chemical weapon attack, even going as far as to use false reports about Youtube timestamps to obfuscate the realities […]
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 […]
Alexei Navalny, the opposition’s candidate for Moscow’s mayor, had a rough few days last weekend. At the end of the week he was given a verbal warning for breaking laws governing campaign literature – laws that it’s very unclear whether Navalny actually broke. Then, over the weekend, Navalny was briefly detained by police, as were […]
Russia’s isolation is growing by the minute. Yesterday I wrote that if the United States and its allies attack Syria, which is likely, then it will be a major blow to the United Nations which will have been sidestepped. Ironically, while Russia and its allies (Syria, Iran, China) often complain that the UN is a […]
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, […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is often put into the position of defending the Assad regime against UN Security Council actions, and the accusations of the international community. Russia has attempted to place itself between the wrath of the United States and its key allies and the Assad regime by claiming that it is only working […]
