This year’s top three “men of the year” include Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, and Edward Snowden. But if the “people who made history in 2013” were to be chosen, it should be the actual people—those Ukrainians who have gathered in the Kiev Independence Square.
Putin’s announcement about an impending pardon for Mikhail Khodorkovsky at his year-end press conference in the Kremlin today speaks volumes about the state of Russian domestic politics.
The Russian-Ukrainian economic agreements look like Putin’s victory, but the Kremlin will have to deal with an array of powerful opponents. The battle for Ukraine has entered a new stage.
Not only in Russia where ideologists use the issue of homosexual rights as a dividing line between the East and the West, but in some other post-communist states as well the European agenda on gay and lesbian rights is not shared by the majority of population.
Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly means that the president has exhausted himself and can no longer find a single thought or idea that would suggest that he is staying in the Kremlin because he still has something to offer Russia.
The 20th anniversary of Russia’s Constitution and the Russian president’s State of the Nation Address delivered before the Federal Assembly are an opportune moment to sum up the state of Russia in 2013 and look ahead, in terms of its political system, economic, foreign, and security policies.
Two years after the Russian mass protests of 2011-2012, the democratic opposition has not been able to consolidate, while the Kremlin’s policy has become more repressive. Neither the society nor the authorities can definitively say whether such protests will be repeated.
Russia’s Constitution is the main guarantee and instrument for keeping Russia’s authoritarianism in place. Constitutional reform that will ensure political competition should become the foundation for political reform in general and for opening up Russia’s system of government.
The choice between Russia and the West should be Ukraine’s, and Russia should respect that choice and structure its relations with its neighbor accordingly.
