Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
At the last candidates’ debate before the South Carolina Republican primary, Jeb Bush made this remarkable comment: While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother [George W. Bush] was building a security apparatus to keep us safe.…
Boris Nemtsov was killed on February 27, 2015. Thousands of Russians marched through Moscow to honor slain Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov on Saturday, the first anniversary of his death, and to press their demand that the authorities find and punish…
The Russian Constitutional Court has fixed the glitch in the legislation that denied the guaranteed right to a jury trial to women accused of capital crimes: According to Russia’s Criminal Code, regional courts only hold jury trials when the accused faces…
The European Court of Human Rights has unanimously ruled that the 2013 trial of Alexei Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov was unfair. The principal reason was the prejudicial use of findings from another, fast-track trial – in which they were not represented…
Talking about WWIII in Munich last week, Medvedev channeled Putin: “Drop the sanctions and take us back into the family, or else we’ll start another war.” Someone has suggested that pitting Taliban against ISIS will be the Kremlin’s next foreign policy innovation. Moscow…
It turns out that the English translation of Mededev’s Handelsblatt interview is an abridged version. The Russian text includes at least three questions excised from the English version. Among other things cut out, Medvedev claims that when he first moved to Moscow…
George Soros talks sense… Putin is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker. There is no reason to believe that he intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis. Indeed, his intervention was a strategic blunder,…
Pictures first. Then the BBC’s latest from Moscow: Authorities in Moscow have begun a big campaign to demolish street kiosks and convenience stores, sparking an outraged reaction among some residents. Some 100 stores were to be torn down, reports said, amid…
The Russian Orthodox church is a Julian-calendar holdout, and the big winter holiday in Russia is still the New Year rather than Christmas. Less than a week to go until the feast of sweet champagne, salami and salad. One particularly popular…
RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, reported on Tuesday that a Pennsylvania resident had been arrested for pro-ISIS propaganda on Twitter. It would have been eye-popping if true: the US has the First Amendment – it’s Russia and the…
Donald Trump’s latest comments on Putin and the press: “If he has killed reporters I think that’s terrible,” Trump replied. “But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s…
Imagine a nominally federated but largely centralized polity with a Continental legal system. The prosecutor-general heads the federal prosecution service, which is responsible, through regional and local branches, for bringing all the criminal prosecutions and for overseeing all the criminal investigations in the…