Putin

‘It was then that it hit me: I was being interrogated by the FSB. It was only then I began to see how terrified the locals were’

This week, the Moscow City Court released Yakaterina Samutsevich, one of the convicted members of the anti-Putin punk collective Pussy Riot. Samutsevich was given a suspended sentence on appeal, while the two-year sentences of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alkhina were upheld.

Throughout the media’s coverage of the Kremlin’s heinous treatment of Pussy Riot one thing has been shamefully overlooked: their feminism

Dictatorships may not be lumbering behemoths, but William J Dobson overstates the extent to which authoritarians have changed their ways

What will it take for the Obama administration to realise that their treasured “Reset” is the foreign policy equivalent of Monty’s Python’s dead parrot? The insults and harassment heaped upon Michel McFaul, the American Ambassador to Russia, apparently aren’t enough.

The Cold War may be over but the paranoid rhetoric is not. It’s time for the US to recognise the Kremlin is crumbling.

On and off the chessboard, the ex-world champion is a fighter. Now the man who has led the struggle for Russian democracy talks to Standpoint

‘The Chechen Islamists who struck Russia in March have discovered the benefits of going viral on the internet’

As part of his research for this month’s Dispatch from Siberia, Ben Judah interviewed Anton Surikov, a member of Russian military intelligence. It was Surikov’s last interview for the western media – he died two months later in mysterious circumstances