Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Meduza reported from Moscow yesterday: Prosecutors have asked for a four-year prison sentence in the case of 21-year-old Egor Zhukov [or Yegor; the name is a folk version of George], a student at the Higher School of Economics… Zhukov has…
When Russia holds elections, whether national, regional or municipal, the votes are first counted at the polling stations. Each station serves a polling precinct, the minimal unit in the system so to say. Each precinct has its own electoral commission,…
At the previous election to the Moscow city council (aka the Moscow city Duma, Mosgorduma), the Kremlin’s puppet party (United Russia, UR) won 38 seats out of 45. Yesterday, UR’s candidates – all of them running as independents as the…
Putin in Helsinki, August 22, 2019: Russian opposition members were banned from running for Moscow’s legislature because they had submitted “falsified” signatures, President Vladimir Putin has said, playing down the election protests that rocked the capital this summer… “This was…
Some 20-25 thousand people took to the streets of Moscow last Saturday to protest against the city authorities’ refusal to let independent candidates run for the city council. By itself, 20-25k doesn’t seem like an impressive crowd for a city…
In order to force a Democratic primary in New York’s Congressional District 14, Alexandria Ocásio-Cortez had to gather 1,250 signatures in five weeks. On April 12, 2018, she submitted 5,480 signatures to the election authorities. That’s about 2.3% of the…
Yesterday’s protests in Moscow – against the city government’s attempts to disqualify opposition candidates from running for the Moscow City Duma in September – seem to be getting less coverage than they deserve in the media outside Russia. Of the…
Golos is a “Russian organisation established in 2000 to protect the electoral rights of citizens and to foster civil society… It is the only election watchdog active in Russia that is independent of the Russian government.” Golos volunteers have checked video…
Alexey Navalny’s team not only asked fellow Russians to boycott last Sunday’s farcical election but also invited volunteers to monitor the vote. About sixty thousand volunteered and more than 33,000 were posted at precincts across the country. Even if most…
The Toronto Star has given this title to an AP story on today’s election in Russia: With a Putin election win in little doubt, Russian voters pressured to get turnout numbers up. At Al Jazeera, Mariya Petkova’s report appears under…
It seems to me that quite a few Russian speakers have appreciated the comic quality of the latest address by the Russian president-for-life. It fits nicely with the latest surge in grotesque Russian news – including cocaine smuggling by presidential airplane –…
Wednesday’s predictable but nevertheless bizarre re-conviction of Navalny and Ofitserov makes one wonder how the court managed the seemingly insurmountable barriers such as the absence of the corpus delicti and the ECHR’s ruling. It’s especially puzzling if, as Navalny has observed,…