2013 produced several foreign policy successes for President Putin, increasing Russia’s prominence on the international stage. At home, the Volgograd suicide attacks brought the year to a sad and worrying conclusion. Margot Light reflects on 2013 and wonders about Russia’s 2014, including the G8 p
Late Putinism – immigrant hunters, paedophile safaris and drug addict cowboys; in 2013, Russia has had no shortage of vigilante groups willing and able to take the law into their own hands.
When Yevgeny Urlashov became the democratically elected mayor of Yaroslavl, the tourist city on the Volga, he described it as the ‘birthplace of the Russian spring.’ A year later, Urlashov is in jail…
Professional journalists are the lifeblood of reliable information for the world. That’s why so many are killed. The impunity must end.
The spiral of violence in South Sudan is not simply an ethnic conflict of Dinka on Nuer. Politics, as well as oil, is at issue and a political settlement is required.
How Russell Brand's political activism fuses spiritual consciousness with a resurgent psychedelic counterculture.
The 'war on drugs' is more than a war on the people that use some drugs, it is a war on perception, consciousness and human potential. [2,560 word essay]
The amnesty, presidential pardon and resulting ‘celebrity releases’ might understandably overshadow the rest of 2013, says Tanya Lokshina. But it's far too early to suggest they underpin a significant improvement in the rights situation in Russia.
President Putin’s amnesty which has seen Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova released, as well, perhaps, as the Greenpeace 30, is by no means extended to everyone. Young activist Taisiya Osipova also has a young child, but she remains locked up with no apparent chance of release, says Marc Be
Pyotr Pavlensky is the performance artist who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square. Pained, the government reaction was to institute criminal proceedings against him. Yelena Kostyleva talked to Pavlensky the night before his first interrogation.
A community gathering in North London gives voice to women's experience of Austerity Britain.
A hearing today could clear the way for Isa Muasu's forcible removal from Britain on 17 December.
