Putin's Inner Stalin
It was one of those simple, glad-handing moments that national leaders find their days filled with; last Friday Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin climbed into a prototype for Russia's first domestically-designed and built hybrid car along with billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who financed the construction of the “Yo-mobile,” for a drive from Putin's dacha (vacation home) to President Dmitry Medvedev's nearby compound.
Prisoner of the Siloviki
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has crafted an ambitious agenda; two key planks of which are fighting Russia’s endemic problem with corruption and moving the national economy away from its reliance on extraction-based industries (primarily oil and natural gas production) towards more value-added pursuits-Medvedev’s current pet project is the construction of a Russian “Silicon Valley” outside of Moscow. It all sounds like a well-reasoned plan for the future, yet it’s worth noting that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, made many of the same pledges, but his eight years in office ended without any notable successes either in tackling corruption or in esta
The Faulty Narrative of Moscow’s Subway Bombings
Terror returned to Moscow last Monday morning when a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up in the city’s subway system (the second busiest in the world) during the morning rush, killing 40 people and wounding 90 others. The cable news channels in the United States began coverage of the attacks soon after they occurred and almost immediately began pointing to “Chechen separatists” as the likely culprits - which would have been a fine assumption to make, say ten years ago.Suicide bombings have been occurring with disturbing frequency lately in Russia’s Ca
The Politics of Pipelines
It’s winter in Europe, time for snow, St. Nicholas, and the annual Russia-Ukraine dispute over natural gas supplies. On Wednesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned his counterparts in Ukraine not to try to modify a 10-year gas supply contract between the two countries.
Go, Russia!
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev covered a lot of ground in his annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, but the after-speech reports were dominated by talk of time zones, YouTube clips and the body language of Vladimir Putin.
