Tag: Yekaterinburg

A Yekaterinburg journalist who wrote about Urals fighters in the mercenary company Wagner has died after a fall from his fifth-floor apartment.

Staunton, April 11 – Pro-Putin activists have redirected their fire from people in Sverdlovsk Region who are opposed to the war in Ukraine to faculty and staff of the Urals Federal University who they accuse of transforming that institution into “’a center for the preparation of color revolutions,’” according to Kseniya Kirillova. Just as at […]

Staunton, April 10 – “The mental gap between Ukraine and Russia is growing, and the trajectories of the two country are ever more strongly diverging,” according to Maksim Artemyev in an assessment of new Ukrainian laws opening Soviet-era secret police archives, de-Sovietizing the country’s toponymy, and revising key judgments about the past. In a comment […]

Staunton, February 5 — Moscow has changed the borders of its constituent regions, districts and republics many times over the last century, and Vladimir Putin for the last decade has pushed for the amalgamation of smaller non-Russian areas with larger and predominantly ethnic Russian regions. But there is one thing that Moscow does not want […]

Staunton, December 9 – The Russian government has never been pleased by the fact that it must now deal with more than 80 Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs) rather than a single centralized one. Meanwhile, some Muslim leaders – most prominently Talgat Tajuddin of Ufa – have sought to form a Moscow patriarchate-style central leadership to […]

Staunton, December 4 – Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Muslims of Russia have erected 7,500 mosques or slightly more one per day, a statistic in which the Islamic community of that country can take great pride but one that may disturb some of Putin’s supporters who believe that he is committed to making Russia […]

Staunton, August 13 – Despite Moscow’s apparently successful efforts to block a march in Novosibirsk this Sunday, the Russian authorities have failed to prevent the ideas behind it from spreading not only to other Siberian cities like Yekaterinburg but also and more seriously to Kaliningrad and Kuban. Feliks Rivkin, an activist in Yekaterinburg, says that […]

Staunton, May 22 – “Wahhabism and religious fanaticism may become a real problem for Ekaterinburg already in a few weeks,” an URA.ru analyst says, not so much because of the actions of Islamist missionaries as some in the media have suggested but because Russian officials are closing a mosque and thus losing their ability to […]

On Thursday this week a court in Yekaterinburg issued a two year suspended sentence to a journalist, Aksana Panova, for extortion. The sentence came with an unheard of addition: Panova is banned from working in media for two years. That the grounds for the conviction are ropey at best is worrying enough, though unsurprising for […]

While the focus is on Moscow, for many obvious reasons, we’ll also be trying to look at election results from across Russia in order to get a sense of the larger trends in Russia’s electoral process. This is a report about a heated and contested mayoral election in Yekaterinburg (sometimes written as “Ekaterinburg,” map), the 4th […]