It’s the year 2024. President Vladimir Putin is now 72. His sandy hair has thinned. But those icy cold blue eyes still transfix. This nightmarish vision had many Russian democrats tossing and turning in bed Saturday night. With the daylight, they woke up. Then, they remembered: it was not a bad dream, their nightmare was […]

Russia backed Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, until he fled to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 14, ending 23 years in power. In early February, as demonstrators massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, President Dmitry Medvedev telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in a show of support. On Feb. 11, President Mubarak resigned, ending 30 years […]

With the end of summer holidays and the twilight of the dacha season, Moscow’s roads are filling up again on the weekends. Here are two tales from the traffic front: On Saturday afternoon, Alyona, a 28-year-old economist friend, was crossing a wide avenue by Universitet Metro station, near the Moscow State Circus. There was not […]

In the 11th century, David IV, a medieval king, forged a unified state of Georgia. To this day, he is revered by Georgians as “David the Builder.” Almost 1,000 years later, Georgia’s newly elected leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, took his oath of inauguration at the tomb of David the Builder. Since then, President Saakashvili has had […]

  Above: Members of Yaroslavl’s Lokomotiv ice-hockey KHL team pose for a pre-season photo on August 21. Three weeks later, most of the men in this picture were killed when their Soviet-designed Yak-42 crashed into a Volga River embankment near Yaroslavl.  (REUTERS: KHL Handout)   Most nations have two classes of air travel: economy class […]

Some readers have complained that Russia Watch recently has been all about Libya, which has nothing to do with Russia. They are right. Once a big player in Libya, Moscow will now be a bit player in Libya. In 1969, the Soviet Union took a quick shine to Moammar Gadhafi, extending diplomatic recognition only three […]

Arm chair generals watching Libya from afar ask: why are the rebels dragging their feet in attacking Sirte? The birthplace of Moammar Gadhafi, this Mediterranean seaport is the last holdout of Gadhafi loyalists on the coast between Tunisia and Egypt. Gadhafi lavished public works spending on his hometown, building an assembly hall where he proposed […]

For decades, it has been considered improper in polite society to say that Moammar Gadhafi was crazy. In one Wikileaks memo, an American diplomat described Libya’s leader as… ‘mercurial.” There were, of course, hundreds of newspaper cartoons the world over. But generally, the public fiction among grownups in the West was to assert the leader […]