The resignation of Russia's finance minister Aleksey Kudrin is a much more significant event than the Putin-Medvedev reshuffle, says Dmitry Travin. Kudrin's cool foresight was the driving force behind Russia’s economic resurgence of the early 2000s, and the main reason why the country avoided tota
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
Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin has decided that the time has come for him to return to Kremlin. oD Russia author Dmitri Travin is a native of Putin's home city of St Petersburg, and is well familiar with the conditions which shaped the Russian leader's mentality. The following article was origi
A flexing of European trade muscle means the Yulia Tymoshenko showtrial is likely coming to an end, writes Mykola Riabchuk. The only problem remains how to bring that end about in a more or less convincing — if not necessarily decent — way.
The past few months have seen a number of opposition activists from the western Siberian city of Yekaterinburg arrested, threatened, prosecuted and imprisoned. Some have even been forced to flee the country. Might this be the prelude to a more nationwide campaign, wonders Pavel Stroilov?
Latvia has been plagued by both deep recession and fractious relations with its large Russian-speaking minority. But with the economy now recovering fast, Andrew Wilson believes the country is creeping under the radar and off the well-worn postcommunist map.
Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s appointment as leader of the pro-market liberal party ‘Right Cause’ was greeted with scepticism. Now he has effectively been dismissed and the party has split. Was this part of the original plan or was Prokhorov becoming a threat? Andrei Kolesnikov considers the rec
David Cameron’s recent visit to Russia was the subject of some snide criticism in the Russian and British press. But this superficial approach misses the main point: the purpose of the visit lay elsewhere and a good day’s work was done by both sides, says Britain’s former ambassador Tony Brenton
Land in the centre of Russian cities is expensive and very sought after. No matter if there’s a listed building or a school on it: something can always be arranged to suit the interests of speculative developers, often a fire. Most Russians have experienced the arbitrary decisions of the authoriti
In any country farming is a hard life, but in Russia the mass exodus to the cities of people of working age has had catastrophic results. Local authority programmes go someway to reversing the flow, but not enough. For many town dwellers the country is only for holidays, says Elena Strelnikova
David Cameron’s Moscow “reset” resolved few of the fundamental issues afflicting UK-Russian relations. Yet by moving the relationship on beyond politics, the visit proved to be a rather useful one, writes Dmitri Trenin.
Hardline pro-Soviet provocateurs are exploiting Ukraine's dark history of violence against Jews to depict the country's modern national identity as anti-Semitic, writes Roman Kabachyi.
