(Business New Europe – bne.eu – October 23, 2015) Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating has soared to a historical peak of 89.9% on the back of his proclaimed anti-terror campaign in Syria, according to a new poll. The rating broke the last record of 89.1% registered in June 2015 as the Kremlin boss continues to defy Western opinion and […]
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MOSCOW. Oct 21 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday will attend the final plenary session of the twelfth annual session of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, the Kremlin has said. The topic of this year’s Valdai conference is “Societies Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict in Tomorrow’s World,” the Kremlin press office said. […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – October 19, 2015) A Ukrainian television channel has published a statement by its former producer, claiming officials from President Petro Poroshenko’s administration banned the channel from broadcasting footage of a handshake the Ukrainian leader exchanged with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at a recent meeting. The handshake took place at the start […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Brian Whitmore – October 15, 2015) The signs of the times are everywhere. Estonia is erecting a 2.5-meter-high metal mesh fence reinforced with barbed wire along much of its border with Russia — and backing it up with high-tech drones, sensors, radars, and cameras. Neighboring Latvia has also announced plans to build fences along its eastern […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Jason Corcoran in Moscow – October 14, 2015) Russian President Vladimir Putin is abandoning his much-vaunted pivot to Asian sources of finance, judging by the prominence given to Anglo-American investors during his question & answer session at the VTB Capital conference in Moscow on October 13. A year ago, Western investors were largely absent […]
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MOSCOW. Oct 14 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin informed U.S. President Barack Obama of plans to strike Islamic State targets in Syria during their recent meeting on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly session in New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday. “When we were ready, after the Federation Council’s decision, to start striking ISIL […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Peter Hobson – October 14, 2015) President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday strove to deliver a positive message on the economy, even as output continues to shrink. “We have generally reached the peak of the crisis and overall our economy is gradually adapting to these new economic circumstances,” Putin said during a speech at the VTB […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – August 6, 2015) Staunton, October 3 – George Kennan’s famous “long telegram” of February 1946 was written to explain to Western leaders something they found difficult to understand: how Moscow could turn from being a wartime ally into an implacable enemy, a problem that some Western leaders are again finding it difficult to […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – MOSCOW BLOG: Ben Aris in Moscow – October 5, 2015) President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the UN on September 28 – the first time he has personally appeared there for a decade and probably his most significant speech since 2007 – clearly shows the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals and how it is trying to […]
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(Interfax – Moscow, October 1, 2015) Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on businessmen and entrepreneurs to render financial support to Russian human rights non-commercial organizations. “I fully and completely join the call and believe that we all together and I personally must urge, here, right now, I’m urging our citizens, all our business structures to render support to non-commercial […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Daria Litvinova – October 2, 2015) President Vladimir Putin met with the presidential Human Rights Council on Thursday and promised to rewrite the so-called “foreign agents” law requiring that all NGOs which receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents,” a term widely associated in Russia with espionage, […]
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Writing in The Washington Post, Daniel Treisman of UCLA, and the Russian Political Insight project, considers the roots and contours of Russian aggression. In part, he draws upon and reviews several new books, by Marvin Kalb, Walter Laqueur and Steven Lee Myers. A generation after the Cold War ended, Russian fighter jets are again probing NATO’s defenses in the skies […]
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The Kyiv Post critiques Vladimir Putin’s recent interview by Charlie Rose for CBS News’ 60 Minutes. Russian President Vladimir Putin is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year with his vast worldwide propaganda networks such as Russia Today. All he needs to do is find more unprepared, ill-informed and poor interviewers such as Charlie Rose of the American “60 […]
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[featured image is file photo] Washington Post: James Hohmann and Elise Viebeck, The Daily 202: Putin trolls Obama ahead of United Nations showdown[featured image is file photo].
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – MOSCOW BLOG: Ben Aris in Moscow – September 25, 2015) Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of a UN general assembly to be held in New York on September 28, their first meeting since 2013. The White House said Russian sanctions will be high on the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – September 25, 2015) In excerpts from an upcoming American television interview, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said he admired American creativity and open-mindedness – a break from his usual anti-U.S. rhetoric ahead of a planned meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. CBS network’s “60 Minutes,” an American TV news program, posted an interview […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, September 24, 2015) The recent arrests of governors is part of a broader effort by Vladimir Putin to create a new social contract with the population, Nikolay Petrov says. In the old one, he offered stability and economic growth; now that he cannot offer those things, he is pushing himself forward as […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – MOSCOW BLOG: Ben Aris in Moscow – September 24, 2015) We learn everything we need to know about how to treat our fellow human beings at school. You are supposed to be polite, share your toys, call the nurse when your schoolmates fall down and graze their knees, and do what the teachers tell […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Howard Amos – September 24, 2015) Turkish President Recep Erdogan on Wednesday became the third Middle Eastern leader in as many days to hold talks with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow as the Kremlin appears to be building its military capability inside war-torn Syria and looks for a more assertive role in the region. Putin […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Leonid Bershidsky – September 21, 2015) Russia has never seen a corruption case like this. The successful governor of the Komi Republic, who was faultlessly loyal to President Vladimir Putin, has been accused of leading a criminal organization that allegedly included a number of his region’s top officials. As cheap oil forces Russians to tighten their […]
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(RFE/RL – Roman Super, Robert Coalson – MOSCOW – September 20, 2015) If Russian journalism has a patron saint, his name is Yasen Zasursky. The ailing 85-year-old headed the Moscow State University (MGU) journalism department for more than 40 years before becoming its president emeritus in 2007. The roster of respected journalists who received their diplomas from him is astounding: […]
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(Paul Goble – Staunton, September 17, 2015) When Vladimir Putin first appeared on the Russian political Olympus, people asked “Who is Mr. Putin?” In the years since that time, they have continued to ask because the Kremlin leader has changed fundamentally at least three times, a reflection of the situation he has found himself in and his own agendas. Now, […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Lottie Millington in London – September 17, 2015) [Charts here http://www.bne.eu/content/story/bnechart-corruption-putins-biggest-failing-finds-poll] Corruption is Vladimir Putin’s biggest presidential failing, according to a survey by Russia’s independent Levada Center. According to the survey respondents, some of Putin’s biggest failures were dealing with the “fight against corruption and bribery”, and improving “relations between Russia and the West”. […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, September 14, 2015) The current lull in the fighting in the Donbas is “one of the tactical elements in the Kremlin’s efforts to get out of open confrontation with the West and offer the West a new deal – the idea of a global anti-terrorist coalition,” Liliya Shevtsova says; but it does […]
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MOSCOW. Sept 13 (Interfax) – The obsession of the West with sanctions and not only with regard to Russia will become one of the subjects of the speech of President Vladimir Putin at the jubilee session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced. “We assume that Putin will express our principled evaluations […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, September 9, 2015) Vladimir Putin not only doesn’t want to annex the Donbas but can’t do so, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov; and that means the region will become another edition of Transdniestria, creating ongoing problems for both Russian and Ukraine but opening the possibility Kyiv will be able to follow the Baltic […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Anna Dolgov – September 3, 2015) Gifted young Russians should “most importantly” work for the glory of their country, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday at a new center for gifted students in the southern city of Sochi. The center, which has been named “Sirius,” after the brightest star in the night sky, offers special programs […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Howard Amos – September 2, 2015) President Vladimir Putin will be one of the most noteworthy guests at Chinese celebrations to mark the end of World War II when he arrives in Beijing on Wednesday, even as fraying economic ties between the two giant countries undermine the Kremlin’s “pivot to the East.” The Russian delegation […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, August 28, 2015) The Anschluss of Crimea and the murder of Boris Nemtsov were not continuations of the rules of the game that had existed before, with the first following the 2008 Russian actions in Georgia and the second that of murders like Galina Starovoitova and Anna Politkovskaya, Vitaly Portnikov says. Instead, […]
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(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, August 27, 2015) Mikhail Khodorkovsky says that Russian citizens are fully entitled not to observe unjust laws imposed not to promote justice but to protect the power of Vladimir Putin, a potentially dramatic development in the relationship between the Russian opposition, the Russian people, and the Kremlin. In a blog post on […]
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MOSCOW. Aug 26 (Interfax) – The job approval rating of Russian President Vladimir Putin stands at 83% in August, Levada Center sociologists told Interfax on Wednesday following this month’s survey. Seventeen percent of respondents of the center’s latest poll were dissatisfied with Putin’s work as Russian president. In June the approval rate was 89%, in April-May – 86% and in […]
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(Paul Goble – Windows on Eurasia – Staunton, August 22, 2015) Vladimir Putin’s “new people,” the lumpen who are prepared to take the law into their own hands in the name of advancing the goals of the Kremlin leader that they think are being undermined by the bureaucracy and oligarchs, are the exact equivalent of the Black Hundreds that carried […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Claire Bigg – August 23, 2015) When Yulia Koptseva heard about a Russian government plan to ban a range of foreign-made medical goods, she had a single, urgent thought: “I want my daughter to live.” That was also the poignant comment she left on an online petition that has gathered almost 10,000 signatures against the proposal, […]
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