Russia

In the wake of the news that Alexei Navalny died in the darkness and bitter cold of Russia’s remote Polar Wolf prison, a chill of despair has become palpable among some thinkers and activists. Some have even gone as far as to claim that any hope for a better Russia died with the opposition leader. But this is wrong: the dream of Navalny’s ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ will only die if the international community and Russian civil society let it. This would be the ultimate betrayal of Navalny’s legacy, which is why now is the time to focus our efforts on keeping that legacy alive.  Western analysts have often thought of

With the Kremlin now claiming that it needs to hold on to the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny for another fortnight for ‘tests’, there is little doubt in the West that Vladimir Putin’s regime was either directly or indirectly to blame. Inevitably, the talk is now of punishing it. Junior Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the Commons yesterday that the government was considering further measures beyond the immediate diplomatic prospects, and that ‘it would be premature…to comment on the prospect of future sanctions,’ but that he could confirm ‘that we are working at pace and looking at all options in that regard.’ There are cheap and easy ways to

Three days on from his death, the widow of Alexei Navalny today vowed to continue the work of her husband to bring democracy to Russia and free it from Putin’s grip. Speaking on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time, Yulia acknowledged that she ‘shouldn’t be sitting here, shouldn’t have had to record this video’ but the person who should have been, she said, ‘was murdered by Vladimir Putin’. ‘Three days ago, Vladimir Putin killed my husband Alexei Navalny,’ she said.  Russians should unite in their ‘rage, аnger, hatred’, Yulia Navalnaya said Against a montage of images of the Russian Arctic and footage from Navalny’s rallies, Navalny’s wife declared that

How did Alexei Navalny die? The official version is that he collapsed after a walk in his Siberian prison. But his family are, like much of the world, sceptical – and have shared what they have been told so far. His mother and lawyer were originally told his body had been taken to the morgue at Salekhard, a town some 30 miles from the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony where he had been imprisoned. Upon arriving there, they found the morgue shut; when they finally got in touch with staff there they were told Navalny’s body was not in fact there. It appears the prison authorities have also deliberately been spreading confusion about

Vladimir Putin relished being interviewed by American journalist Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to know much about Russia, Ukraine or the war. The old autocrat turned a two-hour interview into a monologue and spent most of it talking about a fictionalised history of Ukraine. In one of the rare moments when Carlson dared to interrupt Putin and ask about the war, Putin said he didn’t start it. ‘This is an attempt to stop it. We have not achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification,’ he said, and then continued to talk about neo-Nazi Ukrainians. Putin said he didn’t start the war Maybe, that was ‘the truth’ Carlson

Despite a little eleventh-hour drama, Boris Nadezhdin’s bid to become the only genuine opposition candidate in March’s Russian elections has been blocked. What’s interesting is not that he was barred, but what this whole process says about the evolution of ‘late Putinism.’ Once, after all, it was marked both by a – limited but real – degree of genuine pluralism, especially at a local level, and also dramaturgiya, a theatrical facsimile of genuine democratic politics. The elections were stage-managed, of course, and the so-called ‘systemic opposition’ knew that their job was to put on a show rather than actually challenge the regime. Nonetheless, the showrunners appreciated the importance of spectacle, both

Will the anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin be allowed to run against Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency? That’s the question Russians are wondering this week after the independent candidate submitted the signatures he needed to get onto the ballot for March’s election.  Nadezhdin claimed to have collected 105,000 signatures from across Russia – the maximum a non-party affiliated candidate can submit to be considered for the presidency. But just days after he submitted them last Wednesday, Russia’s central electoral commission declared that the paperwork was littered with ‘surprising errors’ – including, allegedly, the signatures of ‘dozens of people no longer of this world’.  There have been questions as to how and

Is war coming our way? The warning last month from Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of Nato’s Military Committee, indicates as much. ‘Anything can happen at any time’, Bauer said, as he suggested Nato should prepare for a conflict with Russia in the next 20 years. No less alarming – in fact, rather more so – is the language emanating from Moscow. In a UN speech at the end of January, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov urged the West to listen to the Kremlin’s arguments ‘while there is still time’. TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov speaks regularly about nuking Europe, and just last week his fellow attack dog Margarita Simonyan (head of

President visits part of his own country. Shock. Vladimir Putin’s visit yesterday to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, perched precariously on the other side of the Baltic states, was not, as some overheated commentary has claimed, a threat to Nato. Rather, it was a sign of his renewed need to campaign domestically. The threat from Kaliningrad and to the Suwałki Gap is heavily mythologised Kaliningrad, once East Prussian Königsberg, is a territory a little larger than Northern Ireland that was annexed by the Soviets at the end of the second world war and subject to an intensive period of industrialisation, militarisation and colonisation. More than three quarters of the population

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war ready to be exchanged. Around 11 a.m. local time this morning an Il-76 transport aircraft crashed in a fireball near the Russian village of Yablonova in the Belgorod Region, some 35 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Everyone on board was killed. It appears that, perhaps alongside a military cargo, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs – if the claims of the Russian defence ministry are to be believed. As is always the case in this war, multiple and contradictory explanations

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

The March presidential elections in Russia will, of course, be a stage-managed farce, but that doesn’t mean that real politics has been entirely extinguished. It offers a narrow window of opportunity for the opposition to try and connect with the Russian people – so the Kremlin is doing its best to muzzle them. On the third anniversary of his return to Russia on Wednesday, opposition leader Alexei Navalny issued a statement on X (via his lawyers, his only connection with the outside world) intended to bolster his supporters’ morale. He returned from Germany in 2021 following a poisoning attempt that saw government agents lace his underwear with Novichok. Answering the

Just when you thought Putin’s regime couldn’t sink any lower, it somehow manages to. Like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that, actually, the Kremlin’s bloody war in Ukraine had had a ‘positive impact on life inside [Russia]’. Speaking at a foreign ministry press conference, Lavrov said this was because Putin’s ‘special military operation’ had united the country and ‘enabled it to be cleansed of all those who felt no sense of belonging to Russian history or culture’ after thousands moved abroad in opposition to the war. It hardly needs saying that the nearly 20,000 Russians detained for protesting against the war, and the