Russia has only rarely been a democracy and certainly is not one now, Vladimir Pastukhov says; but the fusion of the state and the criminal world that occurred in the 1990s and continues to this day is something new and is if anything more...
The recent coverage of the system of torture and rape in Russian penal institutions has had two important consequences as far as Russian public opinion is concerned. On the one hand, it has revealed significant support among the population...
Vladimir Osechkin, head of the Gulagu.net project which has provided video tape confirmation of torture in Russian prisons, says that Moscow which this evidence shows created a system of torture in its prisons and camps has now lost...
Prisons and even their reputation for brutality are an important support for the Putin regime because Russians do not want to risk falling into them and thus are more willing to go along with what the regime wants. But for that threat to...
The portal GULAGU.Net (“No to the GULAG” – a volunteer project against corruption and torture in Russia) has obtained 40 gigabytes of Russian penal system video archives documenting Penal Service and FSB agents...
Two high-resonance processes have been simultaneously unfolding in Europe in the last few weeks: the sharp increase in the prices on natural gas (see EDM, August 11) as well as the fierce contestation in the parliamentary elections in...
The Russian-American commentator argues that the West’s sanctions regime is based on the false assumption that Moscow will react to sanctions the same way it would in seeking to avoid the impact of the sanctions on Russia as a whole...
But a consideration of them collectively shows that what Putin is about is not just subordinating Ukraine to his will but forcing the West to recognize his power and right to do so, a recognition that would represent a far greater victory...
Yury Shulipa, author of How Putin Kills Abroad, says that Putin has two reasons for doing away with his political opponents. On the one hand, he wants to spread fear among both others who oppose him and the international system as a whole....
Drawing on his contacts that he had developed with the criminal world during his first years in the KGB, Vladimir Putin in 1998 when he was head of the Russian FSB created the mixed intelligence-criminal group that blew up the apartment...
In October 2022, a few weeks before the Ukrainian Army liberated Kherson, Russian soldiers parked several school buses next to the Regional Art Museum named after Oleksii Shovkunenko. Over four days, the invaders loaded their vehicles with...