The eternal, hotly-debated question about whether or not Vladimir Putin will return to the Kremlin was answered yesterday in the affirmative. None other than Dmitri Medvedev made the announcement, minutes before Putin returned to the stage at the United Russia party convention to deliver what was essentially an early victory speech. There is much to …
Continue reading ‘No Time for Obituaries: Putin’s Return in 2012’ »
On July 13, 2011, Aleksei Navalny shared a link to an interesting “Instruction Manual” on “Tactical Democracy” by Mikhail Zhivov, a Volgograd IT specialist who recently started a LiveJournal blog. Zhivov has just a handful of LJ ‘friends’ and even fewer followers on Twitter. Even Navalny didn’t bother to follow him. And yet, despite this …
Robert Kagan — decorated academician, Carnegie Endowment talking head, and older brother of Fred Kagan, ‘author’ of the Iraqi and Afghan Surges — has an article out in the current edition of World Affairs. In ‘Obama’s Year One,’ Kagan tries to debunk the concept that the President’s foreign policy is realist, arguing instead that it …
In a recent Foreign Policy article, Lilia Shevtsova has done a wonderful, though I think unintentional, job of synthesizing the paranoia of today’s neoconservatives. According to her assessment, America and Europe are abandoning Russia, leaving her to the wolves of illiberality. Russia’s dissidents are being deprived of their last “moral support and understanding,” and the …
Continue reading ‘The Illiberality of U.S.-Russian Relations’ »