Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
It is often said that, lately, the Kremlin has been successfully punching above Russia’s economic weight in the global arena. Surprisingly, Russia has positioned itself as a reliable partner, an actor that would never betray its allies or clients. Not…
I wrote this two and a half years ago: If President Trump is truly an aging Narcissus, few things would please him more than toppling a powerful leader whom he, Trump, has previously considered close to a peer… If the…
Environmental protests have been going strong in different parts of Russia in the past year or two but have yet to coalesce into a national movement. It’s local or regional concerns, typically, that drive people outdoors to protest. When an…
The fearsome shaman’s march on Moscow has been interrupted – suspended – reversed perhaps – but echoes of his tambourine will be troubling the sleep of Kremlin denizens for some time. Why am I so sure? Because both they and…
More details on Alexander Gabyshev, the anti-Putin shaman: “Armed security services blocked the highway, quickly encircled our camp and headed straight to the shaman’s tent,” Viktor Yegorov, one of Gabyshev’s supporters, said in a video from the scene. “They drove…
News from Eastern Siberia: A wandering shaman on a quest to “drive the evil spirit of [Vladimir] Putin from the Kremlin” has been arrested in Siberia by armed police. Alexander Gabyshev had walked an estimated 1,700 miles from the remote…
Here’s Meduza on the experimental “electronic voting” at the Moscow city election: …[O]fficials have assembled something even more obfuscated than traditional voting… [O]nline observers effectively will have no way of knowing if electronic votes have been counted properly. In essence,…
More from last Sunday’s election in Moscow: The candidate Putin reportedly voted for came third out of three in his district. The leader of United Russia’s faction in the city council lost his seat. Protest voters elected a dummy in…
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…
Judging by various Russian sources, yesterday’s rally – officially permitted by the city authorities – numbered 50,000 to 60,000 thousand. That’s probably the maximum possible turnout during this dead season of summer vacations and dachas. When an officially authorized rally…
On July 27, when protesters were out in the streets in Moscow, Putin was in St. Petersburg, where a navy parade was due the next day. He spent his time well, descending to the bottom of the Gulf of Finland…