The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
A quote from September 2021: Only two major pollsters, FOM and VTsIOM, are allowed to publish their findings in Russia. Naturally, both are Kremlin-friendly. Levada Center was declared a “foreign agent” in 2016 and banned from reporting its polls during…
Seven and a half years ago, in 2015, Stratfor released a 10-year forecast that saw Russia falling apart by 2025. When the think tank updated its forecast five years later, it no longer mentioned Russia’s disintegration. But I’ve never stopped…
In a recent NYT column, Fiona Hill gave a convincing summary of the Kremlin’s strategy: This time, Mr. Putin’s aim is bigger than closing NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine and taking more territory — he wants to evict the United…
In September 2016, Marwan Bishara wrote a series of five pieces on the unusual personal relationship between the then Secretary of the State John Kerry and the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. This a link to the fifth, and last,…
Opponents of the EU-Ukraine association agreement made up 61% of the voters who took part in the Dutch referendum. The turnout was 32%. That works out to 20% of the eligible voters opposing the agreement. Potentially, a powerful minority, but a…
The Guardian published a long article by Peter Pomerantsev on the Kremlin’s information warfare last week, along with a Russian translation. While it reads smoothly in English, the Russian version requires a little effort to take in, but I still hope it…
Paul Goble has summarized a piece by the Ukrainian journalist Bogdan Butkevich, 10 Reasons Why the Donbass Will Not Become Ulster. I’ve been saying some of these things here and elsewhere but a Ukrainian perspective is more valuable. Some quotes – first, on…
More from Peter Pomerantsev’s Ukrains’ka Pravda interview (his text, translated by me, is in blue). I think he cuts to the heart of the problem but I detest the idea of a “global BBC” financed by a group of governments. There…
Peter Pomerantsev speaking to Ukrains’ka Pravda. Excerpt One (dark blue, translation mine), no comment for now: It’s not that the Kremlin has built a political system around Baudrillard’s ideas. Russia arrived at postmodernism via post-Soviet cynicism. It followed its own…
Last weekend, on the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russian TV aired a propaganda “documentary” called Krym: vozvraschenie na rodinu, which can be translated as Crimea: Homecoming or literally Crimea: The Return to Motherland. Let’s do a simple…
Last week, The Interpreter ran a story by Paul Goble that emphasized the importance of the urban-rural divide for understanding today’s Ukraine. The story was largely based on an interview with Sergey Koshman, a coordinator of We Are Europeans, a Ukrainan civil movement, published…
I’m not going to watch that documentary but there seems to be little discrepancy over its content between the state-controlled and independent media and from what I have read so far, I believe this title and subtitle, by the Ukrainian UNIAN, area…