Carnegie Moscow Center
The joint public work-out by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev sent a political message to the elite and the general public. Loyal professionals are required to deal with the current crisis and the president needs his prime minister again.
If you look at the entire 15 years that Putin has been in power, rather than just the last year and a half, you can see that this is the fourth time his popularity has soared this high. Furthermore, there are simultaneous changes in various indicators, which makes for a more complicated picture than what most observers see
Russia is a superpower in decline, and the challenge it poses to the United States is very different from that posed by the Soviet Union.
Putin phoned IMF chief, asking the Europeans to support Athens in any way possible. It is likely that Obama asked to do the same thing: there is no indication that Greece was ever a point of contention between Russia and the United States—despite Greece’s position on the Ukrainian crisis, its anti-Western rhetoric, and Tsipras’ friendship with Putin
Thanks to the carelessness of officials, what at first was a purely technical question of rescheduling Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections from December to September snowballed into a political scandal that landed at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin
Putin’s announcement that Moscow plans to add more than 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal is troubling mainly because of its political and psychological impact on NATO allies. But it is no cause for alarm.
Under totalitarian regimes, the state is the only force that shapes the condition of society. Vladimir Putin may not be there yet, but he certainly is moving in that direction.
Putin might be looking for a partner in Pope Francis, but the issues that divide them are many. With the Ukraine conflict again on the verge of escalation, that divide will likely only get larger.
Non-government organizations have become “undesirable” in Russia, along with Russian experts and specialists. In fact, they are not undesirable for Russia, which actually needs them very badly, but undesirable for the current regime.
The latest friction between Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov and Moscow’s siloviki was not an attack intended to unseat Kadyrov. It was not even a conflict per se. Instead, it was an attempt to reformat Moscow’s approach to Chechnya. The contract with Kadyrov isn’t being annulled; it’s just being rewritten before its next extension.