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...
Following the arrest of Michael Calvey, the senior partner at Baring Vostok Capital, ever more people are asking whether it is possible for foreigners to work in Putin’s Russia. Andrey Movchan of the Movchan Group says that the...
Russian foreign policy, Igor Eidman says, “consists of a bizarre mix of the traditions of a corrupt bureaucracy and a criminal world.” Europeans and others in the West need to recognize this; otherwise, they will discover...
The violence Moscow “exported” to Ukraine and other parts of what the Kremlin claims are parts of “the Russian world” is coming back to haunt Russia at home, with Russians ever more inclined to see violence as a...
Despite the Putin regime’s massive police presence – Russia now has more police per capita than any other country in the world – youth gangs are killing, raping and attacking representatives of the authorities across...
Russia is rapidly descending into “a swamp of illegality and unconstrained banditry” in large measure because those features of the Donbas regimes Moscow has created are rapidly spreading back into and across the country,...
Every fourth adult male in Russia has spent some time in prison, Igor Yakovenko says; and in some places far from Moscow and St. Petersburg, that share is far higher. Thus, doing time is not viewed as something shameful or bad but...
The key players in the Donbas’ booming smuggling business are politicians, oligarchs, and the criminal underworld. Coal, gold, gasoline, and cigarettes are the main resources the separatists are fighting for in eastern Ukraine, an...
Many are now being distracted by the Kremlin’s charm offensive, but Moscow continues its hybrid war against Ukraine; and one of the most dangerous “fronts” in this conflict, a senior Ukrainian police official warns,...
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...
![Vladimir Putin's wrestling coach, the person who reportedly helped him get admitted to the Leningrad State University using his connections, was one of the city's top criminals, had served 20 years in prison, and died in a gang battle at 57. Putin admiringly wrote about him in his memoirs called "From the First Person" without using the coach's surname or mentioning his criminal links (for obvious reasons). As the engraving on his grave stone states, the coach Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov composed the epitaphs himself. [Translator: Please note that in the original Russian the epitaphs crudely rhyme, but the translation did not attempt to reproduce rhyming prioritizing accuracy instead.] The epitaph on the front panel says: "A grave and on the grave there is an epitaph: 'I am dead, but mafia is immortal.'" The back panel is engraved with the following epitaphs: "Hooray! I finally died!!! All of my life I worked for broads like a slave. Now I won't spend a kopeck on this liver sausage anymore." "I gave her my two final bangs and then was carried away on a hearse." "Let's drink to us all, because the curtain will soon fall." (Image: openrussia.org)](https://static.euromaidanpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/4bbcb9a683811.gif)
