Month: March 2009

March 3, 2009

The Political Costs of Making Bad Decisions

From Yulia Latynina in the Moscow Times: Of all the official statements coming from the government and big business over the past few weeks, three stand out as most important. First, multibillionaire Oleg Deripaska announced that he would not requ...
March 3, 2009

Obama Denies Missile Offer to Russia

So apparently, President Barack Obama thinks that Peter Baker at the New York Times missed the point on his secret letter to Dmitry Medvedev … but we can be less sure whether or not this even matters, as the Russians have already roundly rej...
March 3, 2009

The First Steps in Fighting Legal Nihilism

Shaun Walker, a correspondent for UK paper The Independent, has got a new piece up over at Russia Profile which suggests that Dmitry Medvedev has a number places where he can begin his crusade against legal nihilism: Talk to any small business own...
March 3, 2009

“One of the gravest and most impermissible errors”

From Michael Weiss’s very interesting review of Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (1890-1947) published in Democratiya: At his worst, Serge was too dismissive during the Civil War of the misfit intellectuals who ‘wept for their dream o...
March 3, 2009

Four Motions Brought by Defense Rejected in Khodorkovsky

As some of us feared, the judge presiding over the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky has rejected the first four motions brought by defense lawyers without explanation on the first day of the proceedings.  The most important of these motio...
March 3, 2009

A Swift Rejection of the Obama Overture

During his inauguration speech, U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear that his government would take a clean slate approach to international relations, with the goal of opening up dialogue with countries with whom relations had soured under th...
March 3, 2009

Khodorkovsky Trial, Day 1: Photos and Links

New Khodorkovsky Trial Presents Test for Medvedev (Bloomberg) “In this trial we’re dealing with a president who has attacked the very legal nihilism that we identified in the first trial,” Robert Amsterdam said in London today in...
March 3, 2009

Turkey Critical to Moscow’s Eurasianist Alternative

The building of a “new economic architecture” and a counterweight to NATO doesn’t happen overnight, and despite the doldrums and credit crisis, the Kremlin is still hobbling towards its goals in the East.  Have both Washinto...
March 3, 2009

The Transnistrian Twist

The Jamestown Foundation looks into Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov’s recent trip to Moldova, the first such visit by any Russian official since 2001, when Vladimir Voronin was elected president. Voronin has long been a tho...