JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin’s Regime is ‘Cracking’ as Elites Panic: Former U.S. Ambassador” – Newsweek

File Photo of Red Square, Kremlin, Environs, adapted from image at state.gov

“An argument on Russian state television is a ‘good sign’ that the country’s leadership is cracking, according to [] former U.S. [A]mbassador [McFaul]. Russia [reportedly] has threatened to nationalize assets of Western companies … pull[ing] resources from the country following its [Ukraine] invasion …. Hundreds of companies have already left Russia after expressing dissatisfaction with the war … [I]f the […]

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JRL NEWSWATCH: “Banking on Politics: How Russia’s Banking Sector Clean-Up Affects Regime Stability” – PONARS Eurasia/ David Szakonyi

Elvira Nabiullina file photo

“Banking has increasingly become nationalized in Russia, raising concerns that all private banks may be forced from the market within 10 or 15 years. In the short run, this consolidation enables the government to continue funding its numerous and expensive commitments and thereby maintain social and political stability. David Szakonyi discusses the political consequences of this creeping nationalization of the […]

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Putin opposed to nationalizing companies privatized in auctions in 1990s

Empty Boardroom

MOSCOW. Nov 20 (Interfax) – President Vladimir Putin is opposed to the nationalization of companies sold at loans-for-shares auctions at the end of the last century. At his meeting with representatives of nonparliamentary parties acting chairman of the Right Cause Vyacheslav Maratkanov invited owners of companies that were bought at such actions “with gross abuses” in the early 1990s “to […]

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Russian Presidential Rights Council Calls for Denationalization of TV Channels

File Photo of Russian Television Studio

(Interfax – Moscow, 13 March 2013) The Presidential Council for Human Rights has called for a reform to denationalize federal TV channels in the next few years because it believes that the level of the authorities’ influence on their information policy is blocking the formation of an appropriate picture of modern Russian society. “The Council considers it necessary to recommend […]

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Jewish Library Not the Only Thing Russia Isn’t Giving Back

File Photo of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin

(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – February 26, 2013) President Vladimir Putin said last week that returning a Jewish book collection confiscated after the Bolshevik Revolution was impossible because it would open a “Pandora’s box” of claims on such property. “[If Russia] starts satisfying these sorts of claims, there would be no end to them and no telling […]

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