It’s not that Vladimir Putin will suffer no rivals, it’s that his rivals will suffer. Sergei Magnitsky, Sergey Udaltsov, Leonid Nevzlin, Sergei Guriyev, Mikhail Khodorkovsky… these are just a few of the names of outspoken critics of the Russian government who have been imprisoned or who have had to flee the country to avoid imprisonment, just because they have angered […]
Several employees of Kommersant, an organization with deep Kremlin ties, have been fired for publicizing unauthorized quotes from Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov. The offending quote suggested that Vladimir Putin was afraid to even mention opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s name in case it gave him free publicity. Putin has repeatedly spoken about Navalny without mentioning […]
A Moscow court has decided that the results of the september mayoral election will stand, thus dismissing the complaints brought forward by opposition candidate Alexei Navalny. Most notably, the court decided that President Vladimir Putin did not break campaign laws when he gave an interview the week of the election where he suggested that Navalny […]
ITAR-TASS (the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia) is a state-owned outlet with close ties to the Kremlin. Last week they published the article below in response to the editorial written by American Senator John McCain, which was published on another pro-Kremlin outlet, Pravda.Ru. The article is called “Public Opinion: Reply to McCain,” but as we see […]
Alexei Navalny has announced his readiness to head the Popular Alliance party created at the initiative of his supporters. As a source in the party leadership told Kommersant, the “formal appearance” of Navalny in the post of leader increases the chances of Popular Alliance to register at the Ministry of Justice, which has twice rejected […]
In the United States, the White House launched an initiative where people could organize a petition drive, and if they got enough signatures then the White House would officially respond by either giving a public statement or by proposing legislation. Putin appears to have copied that effort. Before the Moscow election, Alexei Navalny started a […]
This editorial by Dmitry Oreshkin in Novaya Gazeta provides a statistical argument that the results of the Moscow Mayoral Election were rigged. However, what’s far more interesting is that Oreshkin also argues that, despite the fact that Sobyanin stole the last few percentage points needed to avoid a runoff, democracy has been achieved. For the first […]
Moscow courts received 448 claims from Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, including the principal petition to cancel the results of the elections for the Mayor of Moscow submitted to the Moscow city court. “According to the information on the number of applications for revocation of the local election commissions’ decisions submitted to the district courts, […]
Alexei Navalny, the opposition candidate for Moscow’s mayor who was just beaten in Sunday’s election (according to official results) had proposed a hard limit on the cost of cars purchased for public officials. The Minister for Open Government, Mikhail Abyzov, then said that he also wanted to impose a limit on the costs of these […]
The following is a translation of the breakdown of the official Moscow mayoral election results by district. Some key facts pop out right away. In the Gagarinsky, where independent monitors reported the fewest amount of irregularities, Navalny actually beat Sobyanin. Furthermore, he scored 7% points higher than Putin’s opponent in the 2012 Presidential election. In […]
