The EU’s Seven-Year Budget Itch
This article was also published by Project Syndicate. It’s theatre season in the European Union. The play, called budget negotiations, is performed every seven years. It pits the EU’s spenders against its savers, donors against receivers, and reformers against conservatives. After the actors have exhausted themselves with bluffs,...
Ukraine: Delay Votes to Prevent Harm to Democratic Institutions
Press Releases Ukraine: Delay Votes to Prevent Harm to Democratic InstitutionsFebruary 28, 2018Ukraine’s Parliament, the Rada, is scheduling votes on legislation that would increase government monitoring of civil society institutions and politicize the human rights Ombudsman. …read more Source: Freedom...
An Election With No Alternatives
Politics In addition to the list of purchased items and other messages, supermarket receipts bear a reminder: ‘18 March: Elections of the President of the Russian Federation’. Schools devote their classes to the elections and run ‘research projects’ where children are forced to conduct surveys on their parents, asking whether they are...
Gender equality in Central-Eastern Europe Media
Like all other factors of social life in the region, twenty-eight years after the fall of the Iron Curtain the media landscape in Central Europe remains strongly influenced by its communist past. Media content has become Westernised in the sense that it is more consumption-oriented, which entails objectifying and sexualising bodies – female in...
Putin’s true victory in Syria isn’t over ISIS
By Alina PolyakovaIn December, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory over the Islamic State in Syria. This, of course, was the objective the Kremlin announced in 2015, when Russia first intervened in the country. Yet from the outset, the Russian air campaign primarily hit non-ISIS targets. It soon became clear that Putin’s chief...
Russia condemned for launching ‘machine of wholesale persecution’ in occupied Crimea
On the eve of his 47th birthday, his third in Russian captivity, Crimean Tatar father of four, Muslim Aliev has been declared a political prisoner, together with five other Crimean Muslims, now on trial in Russia. The renowned Memorial Human Rights Centre has given a devastating analysis of the charges Aliev, human rights activist Emir-Usein...
The Smartest Strategy is to Say Farewell to Donbas
Russia / Europe It is useful to look at the conflict in the Donbas from the point of view of Russian interests: While this approach is unpopular in Ukraine, full insight into the interests of the parties involved is the key to building any relationship. On the one hand, Russia’s strategic logic is quite obvious: conflicts in the post-Soviet...
What Mueller Has, and What He is Missing
Each week brings a new indictment from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller along with the same question: when will he produce evidence that the president of the United States committed treason?Because that’s what this is really about; Some Russians somewhere may have meddled in the election. But what Mueller has to answer is whether Trump...
Ukraine: the perennial disinformation target
Four years have passed since the protests and subsequent violence on Maidan square in Kyiv, and also another anniversary is soon upon us; that of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia. It is therefore no surprise that we see a focus on these events in pro-Kremlin disinformation this week: anniversaries are often used as a hook to reinforce...
Ukraine Police accused of attacks on journalists leaving one hospitalized
One journalist was hospitalized with chemical burns after the dispersal on March 3 by Ukraine’s ‘new police’ of the protest camps outside parliament. Two other members of the press also complain of ill-treatment from officers in helmets, who they say were not wearing any insignia to enable individual identification. . …read more...
