Western scholars habitually view Putin’s Russia as an authoritarian state. While this is true; it reflects political science’s methodological urge to compare phenomena and validate theories rather than to grasp the Russian state’s real nature. Russia today remains, as it was under Tsars and Communist rulers, a patrimonial state, much as Max Weber defined the […]
Originally published on February 19, 2015 Just two weeks after the leader of the pro-Russian right-wing terrorist organisation “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) Aleksandr Zakharchenko declared that Ukraine was run by “miserable Jews”, a delegation of the German party Die Linke visited the author of this anti-Semitic jibe and delivered what they called “humanitarian help”. […]
Much has been written in recent weeks regarding the readiness of Western democracies to fight disinformation in the “information war” led by the Russian intelligence services. [Read our report: The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money] While it is true that disinformation and active measures remain disciplines in which Russian […]
