In the third article of his series on Moscow’s influence operations in the West, Igor Eidman says that Putin has established five “fifth columns” in Germany. In many Western countries, Moscow has used a carrot and stick approach to...
Russian sociologist Igor Eidman has posted the second in a promised series of articles exposing the falsehoods contained in Kremlin propaganda. In the first, he discussed the contradictory messages Moscow sends to marginal groups in the...
In 1789, the Duke of Liancourt told Louis XVI that what the French king faced was “not a mutiny, Sire, but a revolution.” So too today, Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan is moving against not corruption in the Western sense but against...
The independent Moscow newspaper Novyye izvestiya points out that the average pay in Estonia is now “about 1800 euros” while in Russia, despite all its natural resources, it stands at “about 500 euros” – and points out that if...
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,...
In and around the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, there has arisen in the post-Soviet era a trio of creative musical figures of an exceedingly singular character. All three, as it happens, are women. And though Ukraine is hardly known as a...
