Staunton, October 18 – Polls show that a higher percentage of Russians believe in Vladimir Putin than believe in God, but those figures are less about political support than the desire to find a savior – and, if the experience of other countries including the United States is any guide, almost certainly will dissipate quickly, […]
Staunton, July 15 – Vladimir Putin’s failure to carry out the policies in Ukraine that Moscow’s “hysterical anti-Ukrainian propaganda” had seemed to promise and require are likely to cost the Kremlin leader his current standing in the polls and prompt him to change his image from that of a tough leader to that of a […]
Staunton, June 23 – Public support for Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine is broad but not deep and is likely to dissipate quickly rather than become the basis by itself for any new imperial adventures, accordin to Lev Gudkov, the head of the independent Levada Analytic Center. In the course of a long and wide-ranging […]
Staunton, June 6 – Many have blamed Moscow’s state-controlled television for whipping up anti-Ukrainian attitudes among Russians, but Aleksey Levinson, a Levada Center sociologist, argues that what the broadcasts have done is not to create something out of whole cloth but rather to shape and exacerbate it. In an interview with Andrey Lipsky of Novaya […]
Staunton, May 28 – The share of Russians who are “skeptical” about the value of political parties for themselves and their country is opening the way for a return to a one-party system, in some ways resembling the one that existed in Soviet times, according to a Moscow commentator. In a Rosbalt.ru blog post yesterday, […]
Staunton, March 24 – The majority of residents of Crimea almost certainly did not vote to join the Russian Federation, according to a detailed analysis of that vote by Andrey Illarionov, and Putin’s claimed victory was, as many have suspected, the result of the kind of massive falsification Putin has perpetrated in Russian elections in […]
Moscow’s mayoral election is today, and opposition candidate Alexei Navalny is behind in the polls. Digging through some of the latest polling, it appears that Navalny, while he has growing support, also has very high unfavorability ratings among many who think he’s too radical. This assessment is a translation of an article by a political […]
Original artwork by Dan Nott. We’ve been following the Russian government’s response to the Syrian crisis. We’ve written about how Russia has doubled down on its support of Assad in the wake of the August 21st chemical weapon attack, even going as far as to use false reports about Youtube timestamps to obfuscate the realities […]
