An article in The Atlantic by foreign affairs commentator Michael Weiss argues that the case against opposition leader Alexei Navalny is an example of how President Vladimir Putin's Russia is not a normal country and no longer pretends to be.
An article in The Economist attempts to interpret a sudden crackdown on extravagant officials in Russia, arguing that the recent purges of former State Duma deputies Vladimir Pekhtin and Anatoly Lomakin signal a shift in Russia’s politics.
The Washington Post writes that a campaign of insinuation and insult has targeted Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and in a country where all power flows from the top downward, his boss, President Vladimir Putin, has done nothing all winter to stop it.
Kristiina Ojuland, an MEP in the Liberal group in the EU parliament and Estonia's former foreign minister, writes in an opinion piece in EUobserver that an ever-growing segment of Russian society has become disillusioned with President Vladimir Putin's regime and has found renewed courage to speak out.
In an opinion editorial in The Moscow Times political analyst Georgy Bovt notes, on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, that the authorities continue to foster a cult devoted to all things Soviet and recycle musty, worn-out ideas, which serve as the basis for new laws and policies.
In an opinion editorial in The Financial Times Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that traditional methods of dealing with President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin have stopped working.
In an opinion editorial in The Moscow Times political analyst Georgy Bovt says that the Kremlin's populism will not boost Russia’s GDP. The article says the public is being drawn into a discussion of irrelevant problems that will do nothing to resolve the far more pressing need for economic and social development.
Examining the recent spate of government policies with clearly anti-American overtones, an article in The Economist says that President Vladimir Putin appears to have settled on the formation of a new ideology.
