What does the debate over Ukraine’s postcolonial status reveal about the future of the country’s domestic and international politics? Русский
Truth may well be the first victim of war, and fair-minded and dispassionate accounts of events in Ukraine are rare.
Russia today is a hybrid state, combining democratic institutions with authoritarian practices, which coexist in a continual state of tension. Richard Sakwa analyses its contradictions and suggests how the constitutional state can re-assert itself against the arbitrariness of the regime.
Alexandr Bastrykin, head of Russia’s influential Investigative Committee, is one of the most powerful individuals in the Putinite power system, but his biography is relatively unknown. Richard Sakwa has, however, been tracking the rise of this shadowy figure.
Is Putinism a static system, or is it in need of renewal after the events of the past year? Richard Sakwa discusses the options before the Russian president and the elites that surround him.
The Russian election campaign is hotting up. In the middle of September Mikhail Prokhorov was dismissed as leader of the ‘Right Cause’ party, having fallen foul of both the party members and the Kremlin. This sets the context to an even bigger drama, and could be seen as the first stage of it. Ric
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin is the most significant representative of the so-called “siloviki” hardline faction inside the Kremlin. For over a decade, his career has been both shaped and assured by close association with Vladimir Putin. But are his politics compatible with Russia's future, w
Half-Chechen, one-time aide to Khodorkovsky, sometime novelist and current-day political technician, Vladislav Surkov’s life story lacks anything but colour. Yet the adjectives most usually attributed to his political figure are “grey” and “shadowy”. Richard Sakwa reviews a collection of speeches
In his speech to Russia's Civic Forum on 22 January 2008, the incoming Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called for the struggle against corruption to become a "national
