Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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…
When Putin says, “We need to get on with work, not look for successors,” it’s a sign he fears being viewed as a lame duck and has good reasons for that. These reasons are not constitutional term limits but rather…
AP reported this yesterday: Did teens, TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music troll the president of the United States? For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in three months on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma,…
A follow-up to the adventures of the anti-Putin shaman: Aleksandr Gabyshev was forcibly placed in a psychiatric clinic against his will after 20 officers from a special police unit of Russia’s National Guard stormed into his home in Yakutsk, the…
Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine: Most American politicians, Republican or Democrat, would take Putin’s perspective on handling hostile demonstrations as a cautionary tale. This is how Putin would respond to protests used to be, self-evidently, an indictment. Trump…
Earlier this week, Mikhail Tamm, a Russian physicist and statistician, explained (in Russian) why the number of deaths in Moscow in April is a far better estimate of coronavirus mortality than the official rate: Ten days ago [the number of…
From today’s issue of The Telegraph: Russia boasts one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 mortality rates, but new figures released by Moscow authorities suggest that hundreds of coronavirus deaths could have gone unreported. Scientists and doctors say the low death…
Covid-19 data from Russia is a mixed bag: the number of new cases identified per day seems to have plateaued – well, almost – but the death count remains so suspiciously low that it’s impossible not to doubt the top…