Showing Archived Posts

Russia x US on Missile Defense: A Phony Problem Needs a Phony Solution?

Posted March 28th, 2012 at 7:08 pm (UTC+0)
11 comments

It used to be that journalists had a monopoly on blunt talk about U.S.-Russian relations. Since we are not diplomats, we don’t have to be diplomatic. Then missile defense flared this week as the burning issue between Washington and Moscow. On Monday, an open microphone in Seoul caught U.S. President Barack Obama asking Russia’s President […]

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Afghanistan: Pass the $1 billion a week baton to Russia?

Posted March 23rd, 2012 at 6:47 am (UTC+0)
29 comments

In early September 2002, one year after American troops entered Afghanistan, I reported newspaper stories from Kandahar, the main city of the Pashto-speaking southern part of Afghanistan. I drove in from Quetta, Pakistan, and stayed 10 days at the “best” hotel on Kandahar’s main street. For one report, I spent a morning walking the street […]

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Moscow Grrl Band Sets Kremlin’s Teeth on Edge

Posted March 19th, 2012 at 9:16 pm (UTC+0)
3 comments

Just when politics here were starting to look boring again, along comes an outrageous girl band to rattle Russia. With their day glo balaclavas, bright tights and summer dresses on the white snow, the angry girls call themselves Pussy Riot. They’re starting to make President Vladimir Putin look like Dwight Eisenhower. He was the American […]

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Mission Impossible: Send Russia’s Elections Chief to Alaska?

Posted March 13th, 2012 at 8:50 pm (UTC+0)
3 comments

Vladimir Churov, head of Russia’s Central Elections Commission, has been busy in Moscow. The day after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presidential electoral victory, the elections supervisor said that no other nation in the world could have “a more open, fair, transparent presidential campaign.” Previously, Churov, a former Putin aide in St. Petersburg, was best known […]

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Russia’s Democratic Opposition and Putin’s Silent Majority

Posted March 7th, 2012 at 3:37 pm (UTC+0)
6 comments

Russia’s democratic opposition now has to deal with the elephant in the living room: Russia’s silent majority elected Vladimir Putin President on Sunday. This week in Moscow, there is a post mortem round of press conferences. The European observer group correctly called the election process heavily skewed toward the official candidate. Golos, the vote monitoring […]

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About

About

James Brooke is VOA Moscow bureau chief, covering Russia and the former USSR. With The New York Times, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Latin America, Canada and Japan/Koreas. He studied Russian in college during the Brezhnev years, first visited Moscow as a reporter during the final months of Gorbachev, and then came back for reporting forays during the Yeltsin and early Putin years. In 2006, he moved to Moscow to report for Bloomberg. He joined VOA in Moscow in 2010. Follow Jim on Twitter @VOA_Moscow.

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