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....
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...
Russian companies have earned some three trillion US dollars from the sale of oil and gas abroad since Vladimir Putin came to power; but instead of using this money to increase the capitalization of these firms or to transform the economy,...
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...
Alexei Navalny and the liberals who support him have focused almost exclusively on the issue of corruption, a stance that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia’s largest problem and in fact distracts attention from it,...
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...
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...
The photographs of Vladimir Putin sitting on what many falsely supposed was the throne of Byzantine emperors have prompted many to laugh but others to note that “Russia even today in many ways remains an heir of the Byzantine empire,”...
One of the most powerful ideological memes of Soviet times was the notion that capitalism divided the population of any country into “two nations,” a small one possessing all the wealth and a huge one whose production was confiscated...
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...
