This month, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sent a bill to the Duma calling for the reinstatement of direct gubernatorial elections by the people of Russia’s provinces. The governors of Russia’s provinces currently are appointed by the Kremlin, which, through its dominating majorities in the Duma, did away with direct elections in 2004. The Kremlin can also fire governors essentially at will, resulting in governors who are more interested in s...
On Sunday, Russians from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok will vote to decide who will be president for the next six years. If the favored Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, running in place of incumbent president and United Russia party mate Dmitri Medvedev, wins more than 50 percent of the country’s vote on Sunday, he will become president again and be able to extend his tenure at the apex of Russian political power until 2018. At that point in time,...
...e dipping their noses in Israeli politics was quickly forgotten. As James Harding put it, “Israel’s arms race in American advisers was under way.” Furthermore, political consultants – almost exclusively American, European, or Russian – can serve shadier purposes than the purely lucrative. Consultants have often been accused of acting in a post-Cold War imperialist effort to influence elections abroad. As mentioned by Professor Taylor Boas, politi...
...respect all the individual players and components of the team, just as fans love the team itself. After having the enjoyable experience of living in Moscow for the entire tournament, I mistakenly suspected the same thing for Russia with their ubiquitous “Charge Russia” chants. (Russians are also big fans of the triptych “Ros-si-ya” chant, similar to “U-S-A.”) However, although Russia has large immigrant populations of Caucasians and Central Asia...
...ouncil Resolutions 1970 and 1973 allowed for a very “unique” case where intervention in Libya broke the U.N.’s “dogma” of non-interference in internal affairs. Araud attributed the impasse at the Security Council to China and Russia’s opposition to a resolution that would remove Assad from power and install a transitional government. Russia fears the loss of its strategic interests with the Assad regime and a potential rise of an Islamic governme...
photo of 2006 P5+1 Meeting from Wikimedia Commons Last week, the second round of the seminal P5+1 (the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) talks surrounding Iranian uranium enrichment concluded in Baghdad. The powers had met with Iran in April in Istanbul and plan to commune a final time in late June in Moscow. In classic fashion, and altogether unsurprisingly, the outcome of the Baghdad talks seems inconclusive and vague: Russi...
...president, John F. Kennedy needed a way to demonstrate military superiority over the Soviet Union. So, at Lyndon Johnson‘s urging, he endorsed the Apollo program, whose fulfillment implied that America could defeat the Russian military in space. The resulting expansion of American space capabilities also laid the groundwork for the commercialization of space in the years to come. But by no means did outer space power politics fizzle out wi...
...ionals (NOM), subject to minimal regulation, are exploiting the oil market at the expense of traditional firms, who are consistently losing their means for expansion given the inherent competitive disadvantages they now face. Russia provides a clear example, as Putin has successfully managed to leverage the country’s oil wealth to encourage foreign investment in joint-ventures with the state-owned companies Rosneft and Gazprom. Under these arrang...
...aside, few things have remained the same in the world of soccer. Its popularity, by any metric, has skyrocketed. The munificence of wealthy owners has enriched a small elite of soccer clubs mostly based in Western Europe and Russia. And, in 2022, the tiny nation of Qatar will host the World Cup, having won its bid to do so in December 2010 under intense scrutiny. This last point, long since swept under the rug in global media, really alerts us t...
photo from Wikimedia Commons This past Wednesday, Iran and the P5 + 1 (United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany) concluded talks in Kazakhstan to discuss a possible deal to control Iran’s nuclear activity. A breakthrough did not occur, and was unlikely to occur, but there was a sense of “cautious optimism” as all parties departed. No one is in denial of the fact that there is a long road ahead before reaching any la...
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