Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
After the US Supreme Court had ruled on two cases concerning president Trump’s tax returns, Elaine Komarck of Brookings wrote: This week’s Supreme Court decisions on Donald Trump’s finances and tax returns will allow us to finally answer the question…
Back in 2014, one of Russia’s senior politicians (later elected chairman of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament) quipped: “There is no Russia today if there is no Putin.” Future developments might prove his claim correct, in a peculiar…
The BBC reports from the city of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East: Thousands took to the streets of Khabarovsk in what locals are calling the biggest protest they’ve seen in decades. They’re angry at the arrest of Sergei Furgal…
What did QAnon say when Ghislaine Maxwell got arrested? “It has happened,” followed by multiple explanation marks and later a series of photographs showing Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, President Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and others in various combinations.…
Support for Putin’s “amendments” among the general public, according to all non-Kremlin polls, has never came close to 50% in the past couple of months. More like 30%, actually, or even less. The official “referendum” tally suggests a turnout and…
When the Kremlin releases its own “exit polls” from today’s, hmmm, “referendum,” they will reveal as much about the true results as these windows reveal about the inside of the house. (Check out a high-resulution photo for all the details.)…
Nakhodka is a port city of about 150,000 residents in the Far East of Russia. If you google Nakhodka protests in English, you’re going to get just one relevant result for the past week, a report with an embedded video…
As I used to say on this blog, most early stories of Trump’s connections to the Kremlin seemed to have no legs to stand on. Almost always they came from unscrupulous journalists, biased academic or self-serving politicians. In the summer…
Tom O’Connor in Newsweek (registration/subscription may be required): U.S. and Russia Battle on Twitter Over China’s Role in Nuclear Weapons Deal. Twitter battles leave no casualties besides wasted time, mental health, and all things deeper than one’s skin. Let’s see…
John Walcott explains in Time: Why U.S. And EU Officials Are Worried Putin Might Make Another Move in Ukraine It’s good to know that someone is paying attention. I wrote about it earlier this week: Putin’s comments are fake history…
Seen on CNBC earlier today: As Russia holds massive show of military might in Moscow,Putin looks to cement power He first cemented his power years ago. Back in office in 2012. Crimea 2014. World Cup 2018. Cracks started to appear…
More than fifteen years ago, Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman published A Normal Country: Russia After Communism in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. They argues that against the view that Russia was extraordinarily, uniquely corrupt or ill-managed in the 1990s…