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Exactly 25 years ago, the man widely regarded as President Vladimir Putin's political instructor was hiding in Paris from the Russian police. Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg, was suspected of corruption and was helped to leave Russia on a Finnish private jet by KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, who had just been appointed director of Russia's FSB. When I interviewed him on my program “Top Secret”, Sobchak seemed a bit confused and unable to imagine the future. But that evening in the lobby of the Hôtel Ambassadeur we talked about the future. As we were leaving, Sobchak...
The Moscow Times
No matter how unexpected the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19, it’s unlikely to change the direction of Iranian politics in coming years, including the Russia-Iran relationship. The president is, after all, only the second most powerful person in the Iranian system (after the country’s supreme leader), and Iran is not a personal dictatorship. Both domestic and foreign policy are developed by a range of institutions and individuals. The nature of the Russia-Iran relationship is such that it is very difficult for even top officials to alter its direction. ...
The Moscow Times
Over the past couple of weeks, events in Chechnya have shown the Kadyrov regime to be less than the beacon of order and stability it likes to portray itself as. Mass abductions coinciding with changes in top personnel have made the republic appear to be in tumult. Such an interpretation, however, would be misleading, playing into the pitfalls of gauging the stability of authoritarian systems. If anything, these events underscore the current strength of the Kadyrov regime. On May 6, Chechen opposition blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov shared a video in which a man in a suburb of Grozny burned a car t...
The Moscow Times
The reasons for rising incomes in Russia have been well documented: a labor shortage, hefty payments to soldiers and their families, and an unprecedented level of state spending that has obliged defense sector factories to work around the clock. However, whether standards of living have actually improved is open to debate, given the record military spending, high inflation, Western sanctions, and limits on hydrocarbon exports. The data that would normally be used to attempt to reach a conclusion should be treated with caution: Russian consumer behavior has changed too radically amid the war in...
The Moscow Times
The reasons for rising incomes in Russia have been well documented: a labor shortage, hefty payments to soldiers and their families, and an unprecedented level of state spending that has obliged defense sector factories to work around the clock. However, whether standards of living have actually improved is open to debate, given the record military spending, high inflation, Western sanctions, and limits on hydrocarbon exports. The data that would normally be used to attempt to reach a conclusion should be treated with caution: Russian consumer behavior has changed too radically amid the war in...
The Moscow Times
There are many casualties of the invasion of Ukraine that will haunt Russia for generations to come. Far from the battlefields, in the country’s northwest loom radioactive threats that remain only half cleaned up and largely ignored. The Russian Arctic stands to remain one of the most contaminated places on the planet. From old Soviet nuclear submarine bases and maintenance yards on shore to discarded reactors, radioactive waste, and – in some cases – entire nuclear submarines that were intentionally scuttled at sea. Sadly, it didn’t have to be this way. Following the fall of the Soviet Union,...
The Moscow Times
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia has suffered heavy losses in both personnel and military materiel. The high rate of losses is forcing Moscow to send units into battle with improvised equipment, saving its limited resources until everything else has failed. It is a sign of weakness in the invading forces which can be overlooked by headlines about Russian advances on multiple fronts. According to confirmed data from the Oryx project, as of May 1, 2024, Russia has lost 2,006 armored personnel carriers (APC) and armored fighting vehicles (AFV) destroyed, abandoned, or captur...
The Moscow Times
While President Vladimir Putin’s recent inauguration was not followed by a major reshuffle in the Kremlin, there were some important personnel changes. Nikolai Patrushev was moved from head of the Security Council to the much narrower role of presidential aide, which looks like a demotion for a man once considered the most powerful security official in Russia. What should be made of his appointment? Within the Russian political system, different people in Putin’s entourage and in the Kremlin more broadly play different roles. Some are technocrats with highly specialized knowledge. Belousov’s e...
The Moscow Times
Andrei Belousov’s sudden elevation to defense minister has thrust the governance of Russia’s economy back into the limelight. It also caps off a long-running effort on Belousov’s part to break the economy out of its period of low growth, an effort now inseparable from the requirements of the war with Ukraine. Even in a system driven by personal loyalties and self-interest, ideas matter. Belousov has long been one of Russia’s most credible proponents of state intervention within a market economy. This credibility was won by decades of experience as a forecaster sifting through the minutiae of e...
The Moscow Times
Mass protests in Georgia following the government’s reintroduction of a Russia-style “foreign influence” bill are making global headlines. A similar bill introduced last year had proposed requiring organizations to register as “foreign agents,” echoing Russian legislation that has forced the closure of independent news outlets and civil society groups. The new bill’s language has been changed to target entities working as “agents of foreign influence” rather than those acting as “foreign agents.” Like many others working in Georgia’s civil society sector, I believe this change is mere propagan...
The Moscow Times
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