Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
News from the ECHR: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and his brother Oleg were unfairly convicted of financial crimes at trial in the so-called Yves Rocher case in 2014. In…
For years, senior Russian officials avoided mentioning Alexey Navalny’s name on TV and in the press. It was hardly a sign of self-confidence and strength. This last Tuesday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s op-ed appeared in The New York Times urging Russian “democrats”…
Jim Heintz and Natalia Vasilyeva report from Moscow Thousands of anti-government activists challenging President Vladimir Putin’s rule were protesting across Russia on Monday, with police arresting main opposition leader Alexei Navalny outside his Moscow home before he could reach the…
Observer.com, formerly the New York Observer, reports from Russia: Thursday morning in a Moscow courtroom, YouTuber Ruslan Sokolovsky was sentenced to three and a half years probation for an August stunt in which he filmed himself playing Pokémon Go in…
Good reporting by Howard Amos, a Moscow-based freelancer, and Jim Heintz of Associated Press. Russians are taking to the streets under anti-corruption slogans, and not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg: Navalny and his Foundation for Fighting Corruption had called…
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,…
It’s Groundhog Day for the Russian opposition and its informal leader: Alexei Navalny said the verdict at the retrial was copied word for word from his first conviction… As the judge read out the guilty verdict on Wednesday, Navalny tweeted out pages…
“The witch has lost: now everything is permitted” seems to be the operative motto of the day in the Kremlin and its environs. Thus, the de-facto leader of the opposition – the only opposition politician with presidential potential – is…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
More notes on last Sunday’s Duma election in Russia. The elephant in the room. Alexei Navalny – the de-facto opposition leader in my view, although not in everyone else’s – was barred from running, as was his party. The silence…
Russian Channel One has run an unprecedentedly absurd “investigative” program accusing Alexei Navalny of working for Bill Browder and MI-6 since 2006, and claiming that Navalny, Browder and “agent Solomon” from MI-6 conspired to cause the death of Sergei Magnitsky, who…
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…