Staunton, January 28 – Vladimir Putin is very much afraid of losing face, and some in the West are trying to figure out how to resolve the situation in Ukraine without his doing so. But what they should be focusing on, Aleksandr Skobov says, is precisely how to “help him lose face and break his […]
This is turning out to be a bad week for Europeans hoping to resist the advance of Putinism. Ukraine continues to dither, rather than fight Russian invasion seriously. While Kyiv at last termed Moscow’s violence against their country “aggression,” they demurred from calling it a war, which it is, seemingly not realizing that if Ukraine […]
Staunton, January 26 – Because both Vladimir Putin and the West have tried, albeit for radically different reasons, to avoid saying that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that the two countries are thus at war, many of the terms analysts and political leaders have used in earlier conflicts need to be updated to take the […]
Staunton, January 23 – The recent statement by Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peshkov, that “there are things more important than laws” is the latest sign of a fundamental shift in Russian governance from the dictatorship of laws that Putin promised when he came to office to a dictatorship of morality resembling the situation in […]
Yesterday Russia announced a revised military doctrine, signed by President Vladimir Putin, that names NATO as the Kremlin’s main adversary and clarifies that Russia’s military reserves the right to respond to conventional threats with both nuclear and conventional weapons. This is no big change, since it only amplifies existing doctrine, but its explicit emphasis on […]
December 2014 is the month Putin’s Russia was plunged into undeniable crisis. Between the dramatic drop in oil prices and the collapse of the ruble, under Western sanctions pressure, Russians are going into the new year in a dramatically different, and lessened, economic situation than the one they enjoyed at the beginning of the year […]
In Russia This Week, you will find links to all the stories of Russia Update in the last week and to special features, plus an article following up on the news and trending topics below. This Week’s Stories in Russia Update: – Russian Magazine Prices Go Up – Russian Grain Exporters Halting Purchases; Grain Remains […]
The Interpreter and the Institute of Modern Russia present a special report by Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, and our editor-in-chief, Michael Weiss, on the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, culture and money to achieve foreign policy goals and undermine opponents. In recent […]
Welcome to our new column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here, and see also our Russia This Week. Russia has expelled four Polish and one German diplomat in tit-for-tat action against the EU countries’ expulsion of […]
Staunton, November 3 – – One of the most frequently invoked explanations for the inability of leaders to cope with a challenge is that it is something fundamentally new that they could not have been expected to recognize, understand, and know precisely how to respond. That has been the case in Ukraine and the West […]
