All show trials in Russia commence with adjournments, as if to purposefully use as banal legal procedure to interrupt the anticipatory anxiety of seeing the Kremlin face off with one of its enemies. So it was with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with Pussy Riot, and now with the trial of opposition blogger Aleksei Navalny. After all the […]
Just as I was getting used to thinking of Cyprus as the Mediterranean clime where Hezbollah agents go to spy on ‘the Jews’ and Rami Makhlouf is granted citizenship, I awaken to the fact that future of the eurozone may in fact depend on the good graces of Vladimir Putin. An island nation with a […]
Although the US-Russian relationship continues to deteriorate in the face of a vengeful Kremlin ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, Vladimir Putin is still pursuing a strategy of influencing—and infiltrating—European political establishments. Given the amount of capital that Russia and her billionaire oligarchs have invested in the continent, this policy is as much defensive […]
Children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov is now the face of Putin’s Magnitsky retaliation law, but in a past life he was an anti-FSB advocate.
The late Christopher Hitchens liked to say of any outspoken homophobe from the Beltway to the Bible Belt that “sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to […]
In Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré’s most recent spy novel, Dima, the “world’s number one money-launderer” for the Russian mob, befriends two British nationals on holiday in Antigua. He asks them to help him and his family defect to London in exchange for a freshet of juicy intelligence regarding where Russia’s corrupt elite […]
At the World Economic Forum at Davos on Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was asked the inevitable question about Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian attorney who exposed a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by organized criminals and Russian state officials, only to then be blamed for the crime himself. He died in prison in 2009, […]
