Sex, lies and videotape in Putin’s Russia
How women, sex and viral video have characterised Russia’s election season… Young women calling on co-enthusiasts to rip off their clothes for Putin last summer, seemed to have disappeared from the scene after making the headlines for a couple of weeks. As the election season draws to a close in Russia, now, it is worth [...]
Lessons from Grozny: What Russia taught Syria… Following Russia’s humiliating defeat in the first Chechen war, new President Vladimir Putin returned to the country five years later, and embarked on a savage campaign that had many similarities to the Syrian regime’s current assault on Homs. To deal with Chechnya once and for all, [...]
Continue reading …Much of the international community has responded with barely contained anger following the veto of a UN resolution on Syria by Russia and China. The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, was highly critical of both countries, saying they aimed to ”sell out the Syrian people and shield a craven tyrant”. Russia’s ambassador to the [...]
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Arab League suspends monitoring mission as UN considers action… The Arab League has temporarily suspended monitoring in Syria after an increase in violence there. The move comes after the UN Security Council met to consider a draft resolution on Syria put forward by France, Britain, Germany, along with a number of Arab states. [...]
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The media considers whether protests in Russia represent a real threat to Vladimir Putin… Following the recent disputed elections is Russia, protests have erupted on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, and former President Mikhail Gorbachev has called for the result to be annulled, and polls re-run. Vladimir Putin’s government has been [...]
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Election day hit with DDoS attacks and falsifications… The crackdown on independent websites began several days before the elections. Part of the campaign against the Election Violation Map, DDoS attacks began against LiveJournal, Golos.org (an election monitoring association) and KartaNarusheniy.ru (a crowdsourced election violation map). Up until late night of December 3 these websites [...]
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Russia needs to address a growing, violently xenophobic movement in the country… Last week, thousands of far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through Moscow calling for Russians to “take backRussia,” and chanting racist slogans. The so-called “Russian March” has taken place every year since 2005 on a national holiday created to replace celebrations of [...]
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Story of torture in Chechnya makes it onto to Russian TV, before promptly disappearing again… When the Russian news programme Central Television broadcast a piece on torture in Chechnya this week -shortly after a typical segment with a grandstanding Vladimir Putin ploughing a field- viewers probably couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The [...]
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