Many Western and some Russian commentators have seriously misread what the new American sanctions have done to the Russian stock market and ruble exchange rate, US-based Russian analyst Aleksandr Nemets says. Yes, those sanctions initially...
One of the “most popular” arguments Putin supporters in the West use against the imposition of sanctions against the Russian oligarchs is that this will intensify anti-Western attitudes among Russians and lead ever more of them to...
Transparency International has just published its Corruption Perception Index, long one of the most useful measures allowing for evaluating how much corruption exists in various countries around the world and ranking them accordingly....
Many Russian and Western analysts dismissed “the Kremlin list” the Trump Administration released two weeks ago as a bad joke or worse and thus failed to recognize the extent to which its contents in fact have made Moscow far more...
The decision by the Trump Administration to substitute at the last minute a list compiled from other publicly available enumerations made by others for a specific list that an inter-agency working group had been preparing for months...
Talks between representatives of two governments are often not about what the participants say they are and sometimes not even important for what was really discussed. Instead, it is the fact of the talks and the way in which one or the...
Many commentators in Russia and the West are suggesting that Moscow is panicking about the consequences of the new personal sanctions the US is planning to impose in early February and that this reaction may prompt the Kremlin to change...
US President Donald Trump is doing everything he can to delay the implementation of Congressionally-mandated sanctions on Russia, Yury Makarenko says, and that means that “at this time,” he “is playing on the side of Russia” to the...
The post-1945 world order is coming to an end, in no small part because of Vladimir Putin’s successful use of hybrid war, one of whose “most important components” is “the export of corruption” in the form of enormous amounts of...
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...
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...
