Archive

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...
March 3, 2009

The Not So Secret Letter

If you haven’t already heard, an anonymous source has leaked details of a ‘secret letter‘  Obama sent to President Medvedev last month, in which he offered to stop development of a controversial missile shield in Eastern Eur...
March 3, 2009

Energy Blast – March 3rd, 2009

The Finance Ministry says Russia’s oil wealth funds are currently worth about $220 billion.  Gazprom’s gas output dropped 16% last month year on year, due to weakened demand caused by higher prices, and Poland’s PGNiG monopo...