Sochi Olympics

Early this past summer, Chechen law-enforcers prevented an assassination attempt on Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Moscow Wants to Block Those Suspected of Extremism from Leaving the Country 2016-03-22 19:58:24 Staunton, VA, March 21, 2016 – For five centuries, Russian leaders have been obsessed about emigres, defectors and others who have gone abroad and broken with the Russian regime, fearful of the ability of such people to influence Russians within Russia and […]

For a month now the Russian government has been engaged in a full-scale — and accelerating — crackdown against political dissent and the freedom of the press. TV stations have been raided, protesters sentenced to years of hard labor, and activists homes have been searched for crimes that were committed when they were little kids. […]

Staunton, October 12 – In a development that some will see as encouraging but most as an indication of more troubles ahead, the officials who handled the development of the transportation network for the Sochi Olympics have now been given the task of improving transit between the Russian Federation and Russian-occupied Crimea via the Kerch […]

Staunton, August 21 – Photographer Aleksandr Belensky has documented what many observers feared: despite spending more than 50 billion US dollars on the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin has left Sochi not the vital place he promised but a ghost town where there are almost no tourists and where much of the infrastructure is already decaying. […]

Staunton, 4 June – Saying that it is a very good thing Russian environmental activists are “still free” to meet, Yeveniya Chirikova, a leader of the movement for the Ecological Defense of Moscow City and Region says that Moscow’s repressive actions have created the need for a new term analogous to “prisoner of conscience” –“prisoner […]

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, along with several other performers, activists and journalists, have been attacked by Cossack paramilitary police while attempting a protest performance in Sochi this afternoon (RT has removed their video so we have replaced it with video from the Associated Press). The group attempted once again, having been detained yesterday, to […]

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot have been detained in Sochi while preparing for a demonstration. They have been detained as suspects for a “theft” in their hotel. The two were planning to perform a song called Putin Will Teach You To Love Your Motherland but were arrested “with force” along with several other […]

On January 31, 2014, Alexei Navalny published a petition to Russian authorities he had made asking for permission to travel to Sochi to conduct research for his website and his blog. He described the extensive evidence of corruption he had found in Olympic construction projects (in a project translated by The Interpreter) and asked for permission […]

Speaking at a meeting with participants of the public council to prepare for the Sochi Olympics earlier in the week, President Vladimir Putin called “the Circassian factor” an “atavism of the theory of deterrence,” and an “instrument of the cold war.” “Back during the ‘cold war,’ the ‘deterrence theory’ was born, aimed at deterring the […]