There are a lot of bad takes coming out on the war. Two documents provide the background necessary to evaluate them. Masha Gessen talks about how authoritarianism works in Russia in this extended interview by Anand Giridharadas. Gessen has experienced that authoritarianism first hand and now lives in the United States. What Putin has been […]
Category: russia
This is a guest post by friend of the blog, Jamie Mayerfeld. I’ve been sitting on an unfinished draft piece on the same subject: the remarkably bad DSA IC statement on Ukraine. So when I saw tha
Nobody knows. But Russia has been deploying troops around its border with Ukraine, particularly around the Donbas, the area where Russia has been carrying on a small war since late 2014. Earlier that
Some U.S. officials are very worried that Russia is preparing a new offensive against Ukraine. The major reason, of course, is the recent buildup of troops – now totaling, according to reports, at least 90,000 – near the border. But there are other factors at work. The New York Times reports that: American intelligence officials […]
Vladimir Putin has proudly announced that Russia is developing superweapons that will get around the American missile defenses he sees as destabilizing the nuclear standoff. Poseidon, also known as Ka
Last weekend, Dan Nexon published a piece I wrote at the Duck of Minerva. There’s an ongoing argument about NATO expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union, among scholars of the period and more c
Well, the past month has been filled with excitement, hasn’t it? First we learned that an orange white supremacist would be our next president. Then we got to watch the OWS fulfill our worst expectations about how ill-prepared he was to even fake being a president, while one organization that helped get him elected tried […]
Oh Russia, you shouldn’t have! Really. The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to under
Last night, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Louisville, and the bulk of the Patterson School braved deer filled roads to attend. I haven’t seen Gorbachev before, so I can’t say how much or wheth
Putin’s move on the prime minister’s office seems fairly simple. I don’t really disagree with anything Stratfor writes about it: In our opinion, Putin had both the authority and the informal levers to dominate Russian politics without holding any formal office, simply working in the background. However, this maneuver makes things simple. Whoever replaces Putin […]
I get some comments now and again on Russia posts accusing me of being alarmist. I don’t think that’s true; rather, I think that the Russian defense establishment has undertaken an effort
From Warships: IFR: Other statements of intent last month regarding increasing naval capability included Admiral Masorin revealing that Russia is to create two new strike forces. They will be centred