Russia

From the outset it was obvious to seasoned observers who massacred more than 130 Russians at a concert hall Moscow on Friday evening. It wasn’t, as some in the Kremlin claimed, Ukraine. What would they stand to gain from such indiscriminate slaughter? The people who opened fire in the Crocus City Hall cleaved to the same ideology as those who have this century murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Brussels, Paris, Manchester and Nice. According to reports, the group that carried out the Moscow attack is known as Islamic State Khorasan (Isis-K) and it has a reputation for ‘extreme brutality’. Despite the fact that

In many ways, the recent presidential shenanigans in Russia, officially dignified with the word ‘elections’, have become a strange ritual. They’re both utterly predictable in terms of their result and, at the same time a source of anxiety for all concerned. Putin has been in power now for 25 years, and no elections under his rule have corresponded even minimally to internationally recognised standards. Their main violation has been the extensive use of public sector workers, both to run the elections and vote the way the Kremlin tells them to. Thus the electoral machine is technically always ready to provide any result required of it. Yet this was also the

On Sunday, the final day of voting in Russia’s presidential election, Russians came out in an unorthodox protest against the Kremlin. At midday, they showed up at polling stations within the country and at embassies across the globe to take part in the ‘Noon Against Putin’ movement.  The strategy, assembled piece by piece by the motley Russian opposition, was simple. Come to your local polling station at noon local time on 17 May. Vote against Putin, for any other candidate you like, or simply spoil your ballot paper.  The trajectory the Kremlin is plotting suggests that dark things lie ahead for Russia: more war, more repression Some opposition figures spent

Pity the poor political technologists, as Russia’s professionals in the dark arts of spin, propaganda, gerrymandering and outright ballot box stuffing are known. They are not only expected to produce the exact expected election result – that’s the easy bit, when you control the count – but they are meant to make it look as plausible as possible. That’s the rub. As Russia goes to the polls, there is no question whether Vladimir Putin will be re-elected by a landslide. Indeed, it has long been rumoured that the presidential administration has already decided on the result: a clear first-round victory for Putin with 70-plus per cent of the vote on

For the next three days, Russians are heading to the polls supposedly to choose the country’s next president. Except we already know, as do most Russians, who the winner will be. It is a foregone conclusion that after this weekend Vladimir Putin will win another six years in power.  But just because the Russian elections are a sham doesn’t mean they are insignificant. In fact, quite the opposite. This weekend marks a threshold in Putin’s grip on Russia: regardless of the margins by which he will claim to have won another presidential term, he will no longer legitimately hold power. Putin’s fifth term will shortly see him overtake Stalin as the second

Following the wave of articles that have appeared in the Western press since Navalny’s death come three pieces from émigré Russians. All present a sobering and even chilling picture of Russia’s future now that its leading figure of opposition is gone. The first, published by the Russian-language Meduza on 4 March, was by Shura Burtin, a Russian journalist living in Prague. In his essay, ‘The world doesn’t know how to stand up to evil’, Burtin described his devastation at the news of Navalny’s death: ‘Only in the wake of Navalny’s murder did it become clear how unconsciously we still lived in hope for a “normal” future.’ The dream of a

One thing you learn about war, if you are close enough for it to touch you, is that it splits the atom. Situations and relationships that have grown over time and seem to have deep roots – a life in fact – can be blown apart in a day. Now, over two years on from the start of Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ (which came at a time when I was living in Rostov-on-Don, an hour or two from the Ukrainian border), I’m still in touch with several Russians I knew back then. We find common ground, avoid certain topics and continue the conversation. But other friendships were killed stone dead,

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many

Today is a sad day for Russia. Two weeks after his death in an Arctic penal colony, Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vociferous opponent, has been buried in Moscow. Thousands of mourners lined the streets in southern Moscow to pay their respects, their sorrow compounded with a sense of anger and defiance that grew as the funeral wore on. Addressed quite clearly to Vladimir Putin, shouts of ‘We won’t forgive you’ intermingled with chants of Navalny’s name and ‘There are more of us’. The odd verse of harmonious Russian Orthodox sung funeral liturgy occasionally broke through the noise. The funeral took place at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God ‘Quench

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an opportunity to gauge his mood and assess his priorities. This year’s – the longest yet, at over two hours – was in many ways his stump speech for March’s presidential elections, without ever even acknowledging the upcoming vote. Early on, there was an array of the familiar talking points around his ‘special military operation’ – the invasion of Ukraine. That it was forced upon him by a ‘Nazi’ regime in Kyiv and a hostile ‘so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts

Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death.  The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released. To truly