Hugh Barnes is a journalist who has covered conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was formerly a director of democracy and conflict program at the Foreign Policy Center.
A commonplace among Russia-watchers in the West is to see Putin's eight-year presidency as a retreat into autocracy after Yeltsin's chaotic experiment with freedom in the 1990s. Some hardliners even depict Putin, with his siloviki cronies (i.e. former or still serving members of the security servi
Edward Lucas made the interesting point on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week this morning, that almost unnoticed amid the weekend’s press coverage of Russia’s disputes with the British Council and Royal Academy, President Putin went to Bulgaria to sign a gas pipeline deal that closes a circle as ele
Just been reading Andrew Nagorski's The Greatest Battle, which covers much the same ground as Rodric Braithwaite's Moscow 1941, published two years ago, though Nagorski's double focus on Stalin and Hitler brings out the odd symmetry of a grand climacteric.
Say what you like about Vladimir Putin but he's full of surprises. At the end of a week in which newspaper pundits in the West have been wringing their hands about the enfeebled state of Russian democracy, and the Washington watchdog Freedom House has again derided Russia as "not free"', Putin goe
The start of the New Year finds Russia in bad shape, according to US democracy watchdog Freedom House, which claims that Russians now enjoy the same level of freedom as citizens of Angola, Egypt and Tajikistan. In fact, Freedom House has been scoring Russia "Not Free" for several years now. Yet ev
The British Council saga took another surprising twist with the news overnight that Russian traffic cops had arrested the son of former Labour Party leader NeilKinnock on a phoney drink-driving charge. Stephen Kinnock runs the Council's office in St Petersburg, which re-opened this week in defianc
It seems I’m not the only one who thinks the Kremlin may have fallen into its own trap. Nobody can deny that United Russia won an historic victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with 64.1% of the vote, more than 50 points ahead of the runners-up, the Communists. But, according to Mikhail Ros
No surprises, then, about the outcome of yesterday's parliamentary elections in Russia. Vladimir Putin's United Russia party duly won a landslide victory that was never in doubt. Western observers cried foul , and the governments of France and Germany joined the United States in calling for a prob