FIRST THEY ignored him. Then they smeared his underpants with Novichok, a nerve agent. When he survived that, they jailed him. And now they are trying to demonise him. After years of refusing to utter his name in public for fear of making him seem important, the Kremlin is levelling its most intense propaganda at Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader. He is the subject of every prime-time news programme and talk show—and they are not being polite. The scale and intensity of this propaganda assault are reminiscent of campaigns waged by Stalin’s henchmen in the 1930s against “enemies of the …read more Source:: The...
IN 2014 UKRAINIANS got so fed up with the grotesque corruption of their political class that they staged a revolution. Since then, reformers have been trying to build institutions to hold the country’s oligarchs and crooked politicians to account. One big victory was establishing an electronic asset-declaration system, an online registry where officials must list all of their main possessions. But on October 27th Ukraine’s constitutional court found a clever way to cripple this system: it struck down the anti-corruption authorities’ power to punish anyone for lying on it. Piquantly, four of the court’s 18 justices were being investigated by those …read more Source:: The...
A “NON-LINEAR” war, explains Natan Dubovitsky, a writer, is how states are likely to fight each other in future—if they do not already. Individual regions or cities will form temporary coalitions, only to split apart in mid-fighting and find new allies. Each force has its own aims, and these too can be fluid. The war has many...
