Vladimir putin

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Can Navalny the martyr weaken Putin?

Yesterday Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny achieved his martyrdom, with a panelled courtroom packed with journalists and Western diplomats standing in for Golgotha. A Moscow judge turned an outstanding two year, eight month suspended sentence for fraud into a prison term on the grounds that Navalny had missed probation hearings — dismissing as frivolous his excuse that he was lying in a Novichok-induced coma in a Berlin hospital bed at the time. In one sense, Navalny has achieved what he set out to do. Two weeks of street protests in 85 cities across Russia followed his arrest after a voluntary return from his German convalescence — the most serious overt

Jade McGlynn

How Putin reacts in a crisis

Despite its evident distaste for fair elections, the Kremlin is highly sensitive to public opinion — Vladimir Putin even has his own secret service polling agency, which he uses to weigh up policy decisions and gauge his popularity. The Kremlin combines these tools with state-of-the-art propaganda to promote Putin’s cult of personality, which naturally imposes on Russians his singular ability to protect them from internal and external enemies. Whenever Putin’s popularity is threatened, state media amplifies and heightens such narratives. We have seen that in the last couple of weeks, as Russia has been gripped by nationwide protests against corruption and in support of opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. With the

Thursday

Peter Pomerantsev

The power of disinformation is that it’s so readily believed

On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a leaflet from the Ku Klux Clan: A foul stench spreads out from the East River and hangs over New York like a pall — the greasy sweat of the Black Races and the Yellow Races of Asia which have invaded the United Nations. It is enough to make every White Protestant American vomit. It ended with a threat: the delegates better stay close to the UN buildings and the ‘brothels of Harlem, and not defile the hotels and restaurants of the White City’. FBI officers investigating the correspondence noted a

Thursday

Ian Birrell

Trump’s autocratic antics risk becoming the new normal

It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would have seemed unthinkable to have the leader of the free world bragging of being a ‘very stable genius’ on social media, then taunting the despotic ruler of a nuclear-armed nation as ‘Little Rocket Man’ and threatening annihilation of his country. Or for a United States president to lie so frequently and casually that the Washington Post counted more than 10,000 ‘fishy claims’ by the end of last April alone. But we have become inured to Trump’s self-obsessed boasts and infantile tantrums. We have become accustomed to the deceit, the disorder,

Thursday

Dimitri Simes

Putin is resurrecting Russia’s Cold War pact with Cuba

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov kicked off his tour of Latin America this week with a visit to Cuba. The choice is not a mere coincidence. Lavrov’s visit comes at a time when Moscow and Havana are enjoying their closest relationship in decades. The Soviet Union was once Cuba’s greatest patron. It lavished the island with economic subsidies and favourable trading arrangements in an attempt to bolster the lone communist outpost on America’s doorstep. Infamously, the United States and the Soviet Union neared the brink of nuclear war in 1962 over Moscow’s attempt to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba. But as the Cold War approached its end, Cuba became less