Dynasty, which promotes scientific education, is funded almost entirely by Russian communications tycoon Dmitry Zimin. Because he’s using offshore accounts to do so, he’s run afoul of Kremlin bureaucrats. Critics say it’s time for a rethink.
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During those tense days in early March when Vladimir Putin disappeared from public view, the Russian president issued only one official statement: He instructed his prime minister to prepare a blueprint for a new federal agency that would work toward ‘consolidating the unity of the multiethnic nation of the Russian Federation.’The move passed relatively unnoticed, but it raises provocative questions. […]
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The armed forces of the self-proclaimed “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics” (“LNR” and “DNR”) have accumulated significant reserves of heavy weapons. According to deputy commander of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, Col. Valentyn Fedychev, as of 8 April 2015 Russia’s hybrid army in Donbas has 700 tanks, over 1 100 ACVs, 600 artillery systems, and 380 MRLS, as reported by news.liga.net
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Despite a small rebound in world oil prices, “Russia is not out of the woods yet because the sanctions are going to continue to have an impact,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former State Department official who served in Moscow and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/25/russia-recovery-talk-premature-as-sanctions-threat/
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Russia has just taken another step toward pernicious use of the law to buttress the authoritarian whims of its leader. Both houses of parliament recently passed legislation that would allow the government to label as “undesirable” — in effect, to outlaw — any foreign or international organizations deemed a threat to the “defensive capabilities or security of the state, to […]
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“They’ve made the center look nicer than the outskirts, because only the rich come there. They don’t care about the outskirts where the poorer people live, some even still in bomb shelters,” a woman told the Kyiv Post.
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The war in Ukraine suggests a new era of competition between the West and Russia. It has (again) revealed both fundamental differences in how European security is understood, and increasing friction in values. Together, these problems suggest an emergent ‘clash of Europes’ that pits the West’s relatively liberal vision for the region against a more conservative ‘Russian Europe’
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Our comparative project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation examines post-Maidan attitudes in Ukraine, as well as in Crimea now annexed to Russia, and in the Russian-supported de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. In December 2014, we organized simultaneous public opinion surveys in these regions and surveyed …
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Construction of the almost 2,000km fence began following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2014
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Over a year after violent conflict began in East Ukraine, indications are emerging of its severe environmental impacts in the highly industrialised Donbas region, and the grave health risks to civilians that will endure long into the future. The area will need international assistance both to reduce the hazards, and to ‘green’ the region’s often polluting industries.
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In a country where at least 4,000 localities had a main thoroughfare named after Lenin, outlawing remnants of the Soviet era like street names and statues was bound to cause problems.
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The beautiful weather stands in sharp contrast to the desperation rising in Donetsk, a place that neither Russia nor Ukraine seem to really want anymore. And some Ukrainians, as they wait by the hundreds daily to clear the last Ukrainian checkpoint before entering separatist-controlled territory, feel unwanted.
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Recent data show the Russian economy contracted 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2015. In this article, Sergey Aleksashenko delves into the events that led to the downturn, and what we can expect for the rest of 2015.
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Ukraine wants a nuclear missile shield, according to the country’s security chief, something that would almost certainly provoke an aggressive response from Russia.
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From 400 to 700 Ukrainians captured in the Donbas conflict zone have been taken to Russia, and many sold into slavery in Chechnya, Ossetia and Adygea, according to an open letter of the relatives of prisoners to the Russian human rights defenders published on the Web site of Open Russia public organization on Wednesday, a Ukrainian news broadcaster has reported. […]
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The war in Ukraine has already created the most dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow since the Cuban Missile Crisis. If Obama scales up arms supplies to Ukraine in response to Minsk II’s collapse, the United States and Russia will be engaged in a military test of wills—on the latter’s doorstep. In 1962, geography favored Washi
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It has been a week since Secretary of State John F. Kerry emerged from eight hours of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister to say that the two sides had agreed to make a new effort to cooperate in resolving conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and completing a nuclear accord with Iran. The trip represented yet another […]
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Senior ruling-party politicians are throwing their weight behind a proposal to move Russia’s next parliamentary elections up three months to September 2016, a shift that could put opposition candidates at a further disadvantage by relegating the campaign to vacation season.
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Daniela Morari, a Foreign Ministry official who has been traveling her country trying to nudge Moldovans toward the European Union, has heard it all. People are worried that “if you join the E.U., everyone becomes gay” and that Brussels bureaucrats “won’t let you keep animals around your houses,” an alarming prospect in a largely rural country.
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In the past, Russia was an empire, then a communist colossus, then a ‘defeated’ power expected to adopt Western ways. But current tensions with the West are fostering what may be the birth of a distinct Russian nationalism.
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The EU needs to remold its support for fundamental political reform in Eastern Partnership partner states—and use this as a firmer base from which to assuage tensions with Russia. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Thomas de Waal and Richard Youngs, Reform as Resilience: An Agenda for the Eastern Partnership.
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The leaders of the Allied powers met three times during World War II, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The last conference stretched over 17 days in July and August 1945, longer than the first two put together. Harry Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Chur
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In 2011, MIT and Russian institutions including the Skolkovo Foundation launched a multi-year collaboration to facilitate the conception of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology—dubbed Skoltech— a private graduate research university in a suburb of Moscow that was designed to stimulate the Russian entrepreneurial ecosystem and address a number of pressing global issues. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/05/16/mits-skolkovo-tech-incubator-skoltech-struggles-in-russia/
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For Russia, victory came three days after Victory Day, in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit this week to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. It was widely interpreted here as a signal of surrender by the Americans — an olive branch from President Obama, and an acknowledgment that Russia and its leader are simply too […]
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Vladimir Putin’s Russia faces not only international sanctions due its aggression in Ukraine and low oil prices that threaten its economy, but also several underlying crises that are not frequently discussed outside of expert circles. On Thursday, nine leading Russian scholars who contributed chapters to the just-released volume “Putin’s Russia: How it rose, how it is maintained, and how it […]
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In 2013, the demand for political change began to shift from Moscow to other regions. At times, other regions even surpassed Moscow in their aspirations. Thus, a political system other than liberal democracy was the preferred option for 46% of Moscow’s residents, but for only 32% nationwide. The greatest demand for democracy was in St. Petersburg (69%) and other cities […]
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Foreign creditors must agree to the “legitimate” deal offered by Ukraine in talks on restructuring around $23 billion worth of its debt, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said on Friday.
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One assumption since Russia started war against Ukraine last year is that Europe will be softer against the Kremlin than America, which claims to stand tough in defense of Ukraine’s freedom.
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The Russian government has for the first time said officially it will hold discussions on raising the retirement age, a step whose supporters say is vital because the country’s workforce is shrinking. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-russia-crisis-pensions-idUSKBN0NZ27R20150514
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New forecasts from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development painted a marginally brighter picture for its 35-country region on Thursday, but predicted Ukraine’s economy would now slump by a more-than-expected 7.5 percent this year.
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The calls come in with distressing regularity: A man, out for a walk in the forest, stumbles on a human shinbone; another, digging a basement for a house, finds a skull.
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The sounds of gunfire and explosions are constant on the firing range at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center outside this western Ukrainian town. At one spot, behind an earthen bunker, U.S. Army paratroopers are qualifying Ukrainian National Guard soldiers in Soviet-era shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Further down the line, Ukrainian soldiers shoot at targets using different types of Kalashnikov […]
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Monday that the Kremlin continues to provide heavy arms and training to its proxy militias in eastern Ukraine—a “blatant violation,” he says, of the Minsk deal Russia signed in February to end the fighting. NATO says Russia is also building forces on both sides of its international border with Ukraine. Civilians in the port of […]
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These days, Mr. Piotrovsky, 70, has a dual mandate: Maintaining the Hermitage’s centuries-old ties with the wider world amid the chill, and making the case to the international art world that Russia is still a respectable partner. The loan of the Elgin marbles helped on both counts. He is also hoping to help resolve an impasse that has blocked all […]
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The Russian economy is sliding into a recession. Consumers are retreating. Corporate profits are suffering.
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A former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation argued domestic Russian politics are the main cause of renewed tensions between the United States and the Russian Federation at a lecture at the Anderson School of Management Tuesday
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IN THE final years of his life, Boris Nemtsov never gave up on politics in Russia, even when many others were discouraged or frightened away from standing up to President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Nemtsov, once in the front ranks of Russia’s post-Soviet reformers, in the last decade and a half became a persistent Putin critic. To some, he was a […]
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It is a measure of how low American-Russian relations have sunk that a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Secretary of State John Kerry that achieves nothing is perceived as good news. But good news it was when they met for four hours in the southern Russian city of Sochi on Tuesday, following talks between Mr. Kerry and the Russian […]
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The US secretary’s visit to Russia, on the heels of a visit by Angela Merkel, suggests that the Kremlin and the West are trying to cooperate on international issues like Iran and Ukraine.
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Avdiivka, a Ukrainian-controlled city on the war front just 10 miles north of Donetsk, is a bizarre buffer zone. “Neither Ukrainian nor (separatist) Donetsk People’s Republic laws work there,” Alexei, a taxi driver from the village of Ocheretine, northwest of Avdiivka, told the Kyiv Post. Locals say they don’t consider themselves part of either Ukraine or separatist-held areas and, consequently, […]
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Ukraine’s leaders are eager to be seen as reinventing the nation. And erasing all visible reminders of the communist past, they say, is an important step toward that goal.
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is deeply concerned about a series of legislative initiatives that the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, adopted on April 9, 2015.
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Post-Maidan Ukraine is at war. Not only against Russian invaders, but more generally against sovietism. This war has a military front in the East, but as important is the political, economic, social frontline in the rest of the country. Resisting the invaders and reforming the nation are two fronts of a same fight: the struggle for the emergence of a […]
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Secretary of State John Kerry‘s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday has revived one of Washington’s top guessing games: Is Mr. Putin impressed by Western sanctions? A well-informed Russian friend of mine told me Monday that Mr. Putin will not rethink his Ukraine strategy until he is convinced that Europe and the U.S. are able to make their […]
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Some Russian soldiers are quitting the army because of the conflict in Ukraine, several soldiers and human rights activists have told Reuters. Their accounts call into question the Kremlin’s continued assertions that no Russian soldiers have been sent to Ukraine, and that any Russians fighting alongside rebels there are volunteers.
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Nearly 7,000 civilians have been killed in the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists since fighting erupted in April last year, the nation’s president said Friday.
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Secretary of State John Kerry held more than four hours of talks on Tuesday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in what both sides depicted as a frank and cordial meeting aimed at reaching a common strategy to end the Syria war and defuse the Ukraine crisis.
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At its training camp on the outskirts of Kyiv this past weekend, the Ukrainian National Guard Azov Regiment held its Spartan Test—a grueling three-hour rite of passage meant to test the mental and physical strength of both new recruits and battle-hardened veterans.
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