A newly coalescing “Mobilization Party” in the Kremlin is convinced that it can only save its own position and boost that of Russia internationally by shaking up the political board in radical ways and that the most effective way to do...
“Even the toughest authoritarian regime cannot operate on force alone,” Andrey Piontkovsky says, noting that the collapse of public support for Vladimir Putin and his regime means that the Kremlin leader is now considering what he must...
The Duma on first reading has voted to approve amendments to the administrative code that would impose fines on anyone preparing or distributing foreign news on the territory of Russia if they do so without permission from the Russian...
The countries guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity have simply deceived us, as Great Britain and France deceived Czechoslovakia 80 years ago. Why? First, they did not wish to disturb the aggressor, and secondly,...
Russia is not in a position to engage in an arms race with the United States, Andrey Piontkovsky says; but Vladimir Putin does have “a plan for victory.” It involves using nuclear blackmail on the assumption that if he threatens to use...
There are so many aspects to Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid” war against the West that it is remarkably easy for Moscow to hide what it is doing one place by doing something else elsewhere. That makes the annotated checklist of his...
When the history of the 21st century is written, Vitaly Portnikov says, Russia’s occupation of Crimea “beyond any doubt will be among the most important,” not because of the Ukrainian peninsula itself but because of two other factors...
Five years ago this weekend, the Sochi Olympiad ended with many Russians convinced that it showed Russia had truly recovered as Vladimir Putin promised. But those hopes, Kseniya Kirillova writes, were soon dashed by the doping scandal that...
The regime Vladimir Putin has created in Russia is an “existential” enemy of the West and an international system intended to limit the use of violence by one state against others, Aleksandr Skobov says. His aggression against Ukraine...
In Soviet times, Moscow sent out a single ideological message to the world; now, the Kremlin sends carefully targeted messages to different groups, an eclectic approach that makes it vastly more effective than its Soviet predecessor,...
Is the conflict domestic or international? In December 2018, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Ukraine-related part of their “Report on Preliminary Examination Activities” has repeated the...
