At first glance, Vladimir Pastukhov says, Moscow’s approach to the Skripal scandal appears “irrational and inadequate, in fact, the Kremlin is acting precisely according to ‘a protocol’ developed earlier” following the political...
Now, it is time to look behind the smokescreen that pro-Kremlin disinformation is puffing around. Who are the actors behind this? How has the messaging developed? And what are the weakest points of the disinformation campaign? First, some...
Many people are looking at the tough language that London and other Western capitals have used to denounce Moscow for its attempt to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK and concluding that Vladimir Putin has suffered a major...
Felix Kubin, a Russian who defected to the US in 2013, says that he was approached before that time by FSB counter-intelligence officers who wanted him to help develop fast-acting poisons that Moscow could use against its opponents as it...
There now can be little doubt that Moscow and the Russian security services were behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, but even as ever more evidence points in that direction and ever more officials accept that verdict,...
The role of Russia’s security services changed in the last year, Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan say. It was no longer to be “the new nobility” as had been true earlier in Putin’s time – that term itself disappeared from public...
Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the FSB secret police a successor to the KGB, says that the political repressions of the 1930s were often justified because the archives show that there really were active conspiracies directed at...
At least in part because the Bolsheviks came out of emigration to take power, Moscow has long viewed emigres as far more important than do most other governments, treating them as groups to be subverted, communities from which to recruit...
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail...
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in...
Free independent media is a necessary condition for democracy to function in any country. Censorship, on the other hand, is rampant in all its forms in dictatorships. These definitions may be relevant in a black and white world; in...
