Staunton, July 27 – Having taken the measure of the West and found it wanting, Vladimir Putin has expanded his aggression from the military occupation of Crimea to the organization of irredentist insurgencies in eastern Ukraine to the shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner to the shelling of Ukrainian targets from the territory of the […]
Updated Daily. Ultranationalist Sergei Kurginyan bragged that an electronics specialist was sent to repair a Buk anti-aircraft system for the separatists in Donetsk. The citizen reporter at the lake in Gukovo who filmed Grad rockets launching from Russian territory in Ukraine has had his VKontakte page removed. July 15 marks the fifth anniversary of the […]
Updated Daily. The Russian government’s numbers of “110,000” refugees from the armed conflict in Ukraine are clearly exaggerated, even if there are likely at least tens of thousands, but with reporters barred from the area and towns under declared states of emergency, it’s difficult to get the real story. The US government has added Chechen […]
Staunton, June 25 – Vladimir Putin’s call for the Russian parliament to repeal its authorization for the use of military force in Ukraine is meaningless not only because the Kremlin leader has claimed that he has not done so up to now but also because he could reverse this reversal anytime he wants, according to […]
Staunton, June 23 – In Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin has been carrying out “the biggest information special operation” in modern times and has managed to convince many there and elsewhere of a variety of things that did not exist but may appear for a brief time as a result of his efforts in this […]
Staunton, June 18 – Many people have focused on the ways in which Moscow television’s distorted, tendentious, and openly false broadcasts have affected Russian speakers in Ukraine, but fewer have focused on another aspect of Russia’s information war: the spreading of rumors among the population by political operatives with ties to the Kremlin. In a […]
Staunton, June 17 – In the course of an interview conducted by Ani Ayvazyan, Aleksandr Genis, who has become prominent as a Russian émigré writer and commentator for some Moscow outlets, makes five observations which cast a bright light on some of the darker developments in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They include: · Genis says his […]
The majority of this article was written by Pierre Vaux, with significant contributions by James Miller and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. All translations by Pierre Vaux except those marked with *, which are translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. Russia’s military and intelligence sector has been actively involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine for months, as […]
Updated Daily. A critical review of Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide by noted Russian intelligence and cybersecurity expert Andrei Soldatov reveals how little is known about Snowden in Russia. Another NGO has lost its court case attempting to challenge the prosecutor’s designation of “foreign agent,” even as the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that […]
Staunton, May 25 – Russia is dangerously ill, infected with Kremlin-promoted “intolerance, aggression, militarism and chauvinism,” a Kyiv commentator suggests, and there is a great danger because of Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine, that this “virus” will spread to that country and perhaps others as well. And if that infection sets in and Ukraine thus […]
