August, the month of vacations, is often referred to as the silly season in the media; but this year, something important is happening in the American media: its leading outlets are finally focusing on what most in Russia and its neighbors...
Last Friday night in prime time, Moscow’s REN-TV presented what it says was a documentary about the sinking of the Titanic in 2012 that suggested that the sinking of the ship was the result of a Masonic conspiracy with, in the words...
Following the coup attempt in Turkey, many Russians began to ask if and when the Russian military might move against Vladimir Putin. But according to Oleg Odnokolenko, there is now no chance of that given the differences between the...
Violence in Kazakhstan and Armenia are the clearest sign yet that the post-Soviet space is entering into its second phase of disintegration, the result of the rise of a new generation that sees Moscow as the defender of the kleptocratic...
One of the most important consequences of the current doping scandal, Kseniya Kirillova says, is that it undercuts those who currently like to say that Vladimir Putin was moving in the right direction before he decided to seize Crimea and...
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...
Most great powers celebrate their status by pointing to their own achievements; Russia in contrast seeks to boost itself not by doing that – there are too few to mention – but by denigrating other countries, an approach...
Whenever the Putin regime does something terrible that attracts a great deal of criticism, it is always worthwhile to look around and see if that action is in fact intended to distract attention from something even worse. That appears to...
Some years ago, before he became Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves observed that “if the Russians come back again, they won’t be constrained by communism.” Instead, he suggested, they will build a genuinely...
After Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the human rights and economic situation in the occupied peninsula and Russia itself has been slowly deteriorating. Many of the current events in Russian-occupied Crimea are...
First stereotype: Ukrainians are very poor Some Europeans viewed Ukraine as extremely poor. Many Ukrainian refugees were surprised to learn that. “They perceived us almost like we are cave people who do not know and have not seen...
