On the eve of a Customs Union agreement between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russian state television began an information war against Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. By the ferocity of this campaign, it seems Russian leaders have finally lost patience with their one-time ally.
President Yanukovych is steadily demolishing the gains of the Orange Revolution. This turn towards Moscow looks uncomfortably like an attempt to placate the Tsar with tributes
Three years ago an exhibition at Moscow’s Sakharov Centre of previously banned work entitled Forbidden Art led to the trial of its curator Andrei Erofeev and the director of the Centre, Yuri Samodurov. The prosecutors want them sentenced to three years in prison for ‘debasing the religious beliefs
Andrei Khrzhanovskii’s recent Russian film about the poet Joseph Brodsky evokes elements of his childhood, internal exile and emigration with history and stunning footage of St Petersburg. But above all, it is an homage, a cinematic celebration of his poetry
The accusations against Khodorkovsky have collapsed now that two senior establishment figures have testified. He may still be found guilty. But the absurdity of this trial is eroding public confidence in Putin’s regime.
Rather than emphasising friends and allies, today's Russian leaders prefer to single out their enemies, writes Alexei Levinson. It is an approach that plays on Russians' traditional psychological comfort zones, while at the same time allowing politicians to evade responsibility at home.
The poet Andrei Voznesensky died on 1 June. One of the former “big 4” Soviet poets, he managed to hang on to his cult status until the 1990s as that of the outspoken Joseph Brodsky rose ever higher. The poet Elena Fanailova reviews his position in the pantheon of Soviet writers and assesses his co
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Judith Beyer observes the run-up to Kyrgyzstan’s constitutional referendum from the vantage point of the countryside, away from the centres of violence. A Kyrgyz majority will ensure that Otunbaeva gets the result she wants, Beyer predicts. But this bodes badly for the future
The West turned a blind eye to the potential volatility of Central Asia because it was convenient, in Carlo Ungaro's view. Recent events in Kyrgyzstan show how dangerous this stance is. In adjacent areas of Afghanistan the discovery of mineral riches is likely further to complicate an already frau
Media talk of ‘ethnic conflict’ in Kyrgyzstan is misleading, in that it takes ethnicity to be causal. This does not describe the complex, messy process – political, economic, social and structural – whereby this crisis has become ethnicised. What matters now is to understand why and how this has o
Ex-Yukos bosses Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev stand accused of a crime that even prosecutors are finding difficult to define, writes Mariana Toroschesnikova. Now foreigners are beggining to understand the real danger in Russia lies not in wild bears roaming its streets but in wild prosec
