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NATO invited Montenegro to become its 29th member, a chance to examine NATO-Russian relations and to debunk Russia’s claims about NATO.

In recent weeks, public figures from both the Russian opposition as well as the Russia state and pro-Kremlin media have been attacked by hackers who spilled their private communications out to social media or paralyzed their sites. Who are the hackers and how are they able to gain access?

The Russian liberal opposition Democratic Coalition fell apart yesterday as anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Milov, former deputy energy ministe broke ranks with former finance minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his colleagues in Parnas. Behind their differences, however was the relentless pressure, organizing restrictions and privacy-busting of Putin’s intelligence service – factors that won’t go away even if people paper over differences.

The Russian opposition made their first test of the upcoming fall elections in Barvikha, a prestigious suburb of Moscow where top Russian officials have their homes. When they uncovered obvious fraud there, they felt that Ella Pamfilova, the new head of the Central Elections Commission proposed by President Vladimir Putin

When a minivan with eight Russian and European journalists and human rights activists was attacked on March 9 by a band of professional thugs near the border of Ingushetia and Chechnya last week, the story was covered briefly in some world news outlets but didn’t attract much attention. Putin’s war in Syria has distracted from […]

When opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the charismatic former deputy prime minister and exposer of Kremlin corruption in the Olympic Games, was assassinated last year, President Vladimir Putin was widely misreported as taking “personal control” of the investigation. In fact, as his spokesman Dmitry Peskov later explained, Putin had assigned the heads of Russia’s three top […]

Yesterday’s live coverage of the Ukraine conflict can be found here. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards our costs. For links to individual updates click on the timestamps. For the latest summary of evidence surrounding the shooting down of flight MH17 see our separate article: […]

Sociologist Denis Sokolov, an anthropologist and senior researcher for the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, has traveled to the Russian Caucasus and the Donbass to interview warlords to find out what factors sustain them. He finds not so much confirmation of the poverty theory of the “root causes of terrorism” but […]

As we reported in recent weeks, prominent Russian blogger Oleg Kashin has revealed the identities of the men who brutally assaulted him in 2010 for his critical writing, leaving him hospitalized for months. For years, he investigated the possible perpetrators of the attack, theorizing it could be either related to officials angered at his coverage […]

In Russia This Week, you will find links to the stories of Russia Update in the last week and a special feature or translation of regional media to follow up on the news and trending topics below. Last issues: – From Medal of Valor to Ubiquitous Propaganda Symbol: the History of the St. George Ribbon […]