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The confrontations between society and the authorities which are spreading across the country shouldn't be taken lightly.
The Kremlin’s attempt to prevent North Macedonia joining NATO created some difficulties but proved to be rather clumsy and damaging to Russia’s own interests. With the accession appearing to be a done deal, Russia is now likely to lose interest in North Macedonia.
It will be a long time before the U.S. and Russia will reach a new normal in their relationship. The most important thing is that they keep their current confrontation cold, just as they managed with the previous one.
Military pomp is drowning out a meaningful reflection on the horrors of the war.
Moscow and Beijing will continue to have their differences, and they are not entirely free from reciprocal phobias, but the chances of a China–Russia collision over those differences are being minimised by the US policy of dual containment.
The Kremlin will soon wish it were still dealing with a Ukrainian president who so much resembled its own.
The Russian authorities have never been inclined to consider Ukraine a truly separate state.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union appears unlimited, and he is now resurrecting perhaps its most notorious feature: the purge. Recalling the Stalin era, the recent arrests and imprisonment of numerous regime figures have fueled a pervasive sense of fear among the country’s elites.
Will Russia equally fall for a political outsider? Only time will tell.
Over the next few years, the Kremlin will be able to observe what happens in practice when the informal authority of the nation’s leader and the post of president—the main instrument for creating that authority—are separated.
One of the paradoxes of Putin’s Russia is that the harsher the stance of the current regime, the higher the level of Stalin’s popularity within Putin’s electoral base and the more likely these Russians are to make excuses for the Soviet dictator.
Despite their troubles, Europe and the US are not withering away. It would behoove Moscow to avoid escalations.
The Russian president was a man of the common people—until the common people started making demands.
The president’s approval rating is once again in decline, and this time he doesn’t have another wildly popular trick hidden up his sleeve.
Rosneft’s deep ties to Venezuela and Russia’s efforts to insert itself into the crisis there together raise questions about whether the country’s leadership is acting to preserve national or corporate and private interests.
Moscow has repeatedly taken a hard line on Kosovo, forcing Serbia to take similarly uncompromising positions and thereby jeopardize its EU membership.
The Kremlin is going after Russian rappers, but the government can't control a culture it doesn't understand.
The narrative that Russia is under attack has long dominated Kremlin propaganda, with Vladimir Putin positioning himself as the commander of a fortress besieged. But Putin's latest attempt to "remind" Russians that they are being attacked is unlikely to work.
To understand what makes Putin and his allies act the way they do, you need to look beyond the myths.
The Kremlin strongman has invested in Trump because he’s disrupting the world order. Win or lose on Tuesday, that will continue.