Anti-Putin Protests

Is Russia "United or looking to the Future? For President Vladimir Putin, who leads the United Russia party and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, founder of Russia of the Future, it's an important question. It's also one the world is increasingly looking tow…

A quote assigned to Stalin famously rejected the importance of voters: its who counts them that matters. In contemporary Russia, how they are counted is, it would seem, just as important.  Last week, a new poll by state pollsters VTsIOM revealed a worrying s…

Rallies and protests in Russia—over various issues and in different parts of the country—have ceased to be something extraordinary. Not long ago, a handful of people protesting on the central square of a provincial town would have attracted widespread attenti…

Friday, May 24, 2019 (Meduza's newsletter will return on Tuesday, May 28. Happy Memorial Day, Americans!) This day in history: 78 years ago, on May 24, 1940, poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad. He left the USSR in 1972 and later settled i…

A Moscow court has sentenced attorney Pavel Ivlev to 10 years in prison in absentia. Ivlev, who advised Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the anti-Putin businessman led the YUKOS oil company, was charged in a case alleging that the companys leadership stole more than…

A Russian judge has been forced to resign over a topless picture of her, months after showing leniency towards two anti-Putin teenagers in a court case.   Irina Devayeva has stood down after her mobile phone was seemingly hacked and the naked image stolen fr…

Viktor Orbán and Silvio Berlusconi rarely miss an opportunity to share a bad idea. Both regard independent judges as communist agents. Both enjoy the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin more than that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And both seem…

Welcome to The View From There, Foreign Policys newest column, in which we talk with Washingtons foreign correspondents about whats making the news in their home countries that we may be missing here. First up, we spoke with Karina Orlova, the Washington corr…

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 This day in history: 64 years ago, on May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union and seven Eastern Bloc satellite states signed the Warsaw Pact collective defense treaty, following the integration of West Germany into NATO. Chernobyl: Yegor Moskvi…

A Yaroslavl court fined Kirill Poputnikov 30,000 rubles ($461.55) under a 2019 law that bans insulting the government online, 76.ru reported. Poputnikov posted a photograph on Facebook that showed graffiti whose message can be translated as Putin is a fag on …