In Moscow's Shadows

Outright prediction may be a mug's game, but what are some of the people and processes I will be watching in 2025? For those who get lost in the flow, they are: PERSONALIA · Elvira Nabiullina ...

5 Jan 202554min

Sabotage under the Baltic, a grudging apology, a possible attack on a Russian cargo ship, firebombing ATMs, energy blackmail in Moldova... what connects them beyond a sense that, having changed his ru...

29 Dec 202434min

What can one learn from Putin's 4½-hour-long end of year press conference? Essentially, his message to his people is that - however they might feel - everything is fine and they should stay the course...

22 Dec 202457min

We tend to focus on the big challenges facing Russia: war, sanctions, the struggle of authoritarianism vs the remnants of civil society. Maybe it is time to look at some of the less often discussed pr...

15 Dec 202452min

So Bashar al-Assad's blood-drenched regime has fallen. Hurrah. But what now for Russia? Is this a terrible geopolitical defeat, or actually something that perversely frees it from a commitment made in...

8 Dec 202446min

President Zelensky's suggestion that military attempts to retake the occupied territories could be abandoned in return for rapid NATO membership for Ukraine does mark a change in tack. What is driving...

1 Dec 202450min

Schrödinger's Defence Minister, at once busy and visible yet strangely inconsequential and intangible, what can one make of Andrei Belousov, his rise and his chances of achieving anything in his curre...

24 Nov 202455min

'Strategic culture' means the underlying cultural assumptions about threats and options that informs a nation's specific strategic choices, and Russia's has been strikingly continuous for centuries. A...

17 Nov 202448min