Russian opposition to the recent introduction of personal QR codes to identify individuals, control their movement and check their vaccination status during the COVID pandemic is far broader than opposition to vaccinations because even...
For the Putin regime, the war against the coronavirus pandemic is increasingly analogous to the tsarist regime’s war with Japan in 1904-1905, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid. Now as 115 years...
Many Russians blame their country’s moves toward fascism on Vladimir Putin alone, Lev Ponomaryov says. But it is “important in principle” to recognize that those pushing Russia in that direction include a far broader...
There are two reasons for thinking that the new State Duma (Russian parliament) will be the last, Igor Yakovenko says. On the one hand, it or more precisely elections to it mean that what has become “a fifth wheel” in the...
The passive aggressive nature of a significant portion of Russian society is the reason that the country has become increasingly Soviet again, Alina Vitukhnovskaya says. The dictatorship is not primarily to blame; instead, the country is...
Since the recent Russian Duma election, some members of the Russian opposition have tied themselves in knots with a discussion of whether electronic voting played a positive or negative role in the outcome. But such discussions completely...
The Kremlin recognizes this, the London-based Russian analyst says; and that explains why its reaction has not been limited to hysterics but involves real “panic” as “the most horrible thing for any authoritarian and...
The Bellingcat investigative journalist outlined this plan in a presentation to this year’s Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn saying he has sources on this within the Russian special services (youtube.com and ehorussia.com). Grozev...
Putin’s attention to and approval of ever more distant if equally odious figures from Russia’s medieval past show that he is committed to the idea that “mass repressions and terror are no more and no less than...
In an interview with Vienna’s Die Presse, the Russian sociologist and pollster says that initially it appeared young Russians were focused on democratic models but it turned out that their attachment to them was superficial and soon...
In 2014, after the first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, soldiers who had lost limbs in battle were seen for the first time in public as they returned home. Since the full-on invasion by Russia in February 2022, the...
