Russia

Not much happens in Russian families without the say so of the babushka. Russia’s high divorce-rate, and a situation where fathers are often absent and the mother out at work, makes it normal for grandmothers – who often hold the family purse-strings – to raise children themselves. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the younger and older generation see eye to eye: babushka tends not to use the internet or understand modern technology, and might hold conservative opinions radically different from the grandchild’s. Yet there is often a spirit, in the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann’s words, of ‘hopeless obedience’ to her. Something similar is at play in the way many

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. These reports were part of the trove of classified materials leaked onto the Discord gaming server earlier this year. Taken on their own, they could be regarded as sneaky fakes intended to undermine Prigozhin, yet many other documents within the collection have quietly been acknowledged as real. While it still cannot be taken as

Prior to Russia’s invasion in February 2022, few westerners knew much about Ukraine, and even less about Kazakhstan. We all suffer from Moscow-centred perceptions and the bad habit of equating the Soviet Union with Russia.  But now we know that Putin is driven by spurious historical theories, in which Ukraine has no right to exist, one needs to ask how they might apply to other ex-Russian provinces. Nowhere is more affected than European Russia’s eastern neighbour, Kazakhstan, which separates Muscovy from China, in the same way that Ukraine and Belarus divide it from the EU and Nato.   Ukraine is half as big again as France or Germany. But ‘KZ’

There is something oddly Christmassy about the scene: a night-time city bathed, festooned in twinkling white lights, the smoke around them almost luminous. A shower of brilliant sparks falls calmly from the air, lighting up the dark sky – the town below seeming to celebrate something, over and over, with a spectacular firework display: flares, starbursts, dry-ice and Roman Candles. But the visual beauty is a sick joke, the town is Bakhmut at the end of a nine-month siege, and the illuminations appear to be an attack by Russian forces with white phosphorus – so the Ukrainian government claim – one of the most lethal incendiary chemicals in use today.

As Vladimir Putin rounded off his Victory Day speech with a resounding ‘Hurrah!’ to Russia, the contrast between the celebrations of this year and last could not be starker. Putin was a president in a hurry: he spoke for just nine minutes, the parade was wrapped up in under 25 minutes. ‘A real war has once again broken out against our motherland,’ he began. Perpetuating the lies upon which he has sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin continued with the trademark bellicose ranting that we have come to expect from his speeches over the past year: ‘We have resisted international terrorism, we will defend the citizens of the Donbas, and we will guarantee our own safety’. 

Russia is gearing up for its annual festival of state-sponsored militarist kitsch that are the 9 May Victory Day celebrations, albeit in rather more limited form thanks to security concerns surrounding the ongoing war. Amongst all this, it is all too easy to forget that not everyone is consumed with nationalist pageantry. Instead, what is in many ways so much more striking is that there is still an active, if beleaguered, civil society in this country. To be sure, open protests against the war have become increasingly small in scale. This is an authoritarian regime sliding into full-blown totalitarianism, which has been cracking down viciously on any such ‘fifth columnists’.

With the break-neck pace with which it tends to respond to measures coming from the Kremlin, this month Russia’s parliament rushed through a new measure intended to make it harder for draftees and mobilised reservists to dodge military service. In the process, it highlighted the country’s slide into techno-authoritarianism. Until now, the law demanded that the state prove that it had presented the potential serviceman (or his family) with the appropriate draft papers. Although they were meant to be signed for, this still created opportunities for the individuals in question to claim they had never received them. – or make a dash for the border. Hundreds of thousands of reservists

The news that Russian spy ships appear to be mapping British and other underwater cables and pipelines in the North Sea sounds very Cold War. But in fact it reflects the realities of modern conflict, and also the ways Moscow is playing psychological games with the West. In November, The Admiral Vladimirsky, an Akademik Krylov-class ship officially classified as an oceanographic research vessel but regarded by Western authorities to be an intelligence-gathering asset, entered the Moray Firth and loitered near the RAF’s maritime patrol base at Lossiemouth. Since then, it has been on a tour around British and Nordic waters, on a route that took it past seven British and Dutch

With Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine showing no signs of reaching a conclusion, a recent study by the country’s main state-run pollster, VTsIOM, revealed that 91 per cent of Russians consider themselves patriots. On the face of it, these numbers seem to vindicate two camps with a strikingly similar worldview. On the one hand, there is Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, desperate to prove that he is fighting this war in the name of all Russians; and on the other, a growing handful of those in the West who claim to be supporters of Ukraine and Putin’s foes, but who insist with equal vehemence on the populist fallacy that it is not

In a warning to Kremlin critics everywhere, the prominent Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza has today been sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony by a Moscow court. His conviction is based on several charges, all of which he denies, including treason and ‘discreditation of the Russian Army’ – a move that has been internationally criticised as politically motivated. Kara-Murza’s sentence is significant for being the longest to be handed down to critics of Vladimir Putin’s regime so far. Not even Alexei Navalny, so hated by Putin he famously refuses to ever call him by name, received a sentence that long – last year he began a nine-year term