Leading UK journalist Angus Roxburgh has written a book about Putin and Putinism, drawing on his extensive experience in Russia (including a stint as a media adviser to the Putin team): The book is good in revealing all sorts of fascinating stories about the Putin period. My favourite is the […]
Here’s my piece at Telegraph Blogs this morning on the Russian Presidential elections: One reason why Zyuganov is doomed never to win an election in Russia lies in the country’s problematic demographics. Thanks in part to Putin’s policies, the gap between the number of Russians being born every month and […]
A good Guardian newsfeed on the developments in Moscow as demonstrators are arrested gives us this: Andrei Buzin, an election expert at Golos, said that the falsifications were not widespread enough to have left Putin with less than 50% of the vote and require a run-off, but the vote was […]
As Russians vote in elections likely to return Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin as President, check out some Russian elections videos (h/t RFE/RL). First, one in which Apple products are used to show how hot modern Russian girls just lluuuurrrrvvvv Mr Putin: Or there’s this one in which a young […]
Small ‘unofficial’ referendum in northern Kosovo – not many dead. In case you haven’t noticed, the Serb population of northern Kosovo have set up and run their own referendum on whether to accept rule by the institutions of Kosovo. The answer, to no-one’s surprise: No! As the EU knows to […]
Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya? Here it is, and none the worse for wear: You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they […]
Here is my new Daily Telegraph blog piece comparing the problems of the Eurozone with the fates of the USSR and former Yugoslavia. In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority […]
Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated. Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart. When the USSR broke up, […]
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers. No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus […]
Hmm. Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend. A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of […]
