Word of the killings of four American diplomats in Libya took 24 hours to reach me last week. That was fitting as I was contemplating the silence of cedar forests, the grace of wild horses cantering through alpine meadows, and the beauty of glacier-fed rivers cutting through the rugged mountains of Russia’s remote Altai Republic. […]

The upside about an enlightened dictator is the enlightenment part. Five years ago, Vladimir Putin took a hard look at Vladivostok, the faraway city founded in 1860 by Czar Alexander II as Russia’s main port on the Pacific. In 2007, President Putin evidently decided that in the era of Asian tigers, Vladivostok was the Pacific […]

“I have worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night.” Vladimir Putin summing up his first two terms as president to Russian and foreign Press. Feb. 2008. It’s a nice image for voters at election time. But below decks on the Sirius, a 54-meter yacht, Russia’s president is not chained to […]

There is a golden thread that links Lance Armstrong, the disgraced American cyclist, to the Greenpeace climbers clambering about the Russian oil well rig in the Arctic. That thread is called accountability. In recent days, Greenpeace protesters briefly occupied Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya platform, Russia’s first offshore exploration rig in the Arctic. Greenpeace opposes all oil exploration […]

“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” – Alexander Pope, 1735 This summer, Vladimir Putin tried to break three of Moscow’s butterflies on the creaking, iron wheel of Russia’s court system. On Friday, the three Pussy Riot girls were sentenced to two years in jail for singing the wrong song in church. Stalin’s show trials […]

With London’s Summer Olympics over, the spotlight and the torch now shift to Russia, host of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Before the torch starts moving from London, Russians are grumbling about their showing in the summer Olympic tally. Third place, with 24 gold and a total of 82 medals was not bad. Russians naturally […]

I On a sun splashed hillside overlooking the Black Sea, the President of Ukraine and half of his cabinet gathered July 12 for a summit meeting with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. The site was Livadia Palace, the Czarist-era estate that was the setting for the 1945 Yalta Conference, the meeting where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin […]

In Moscow’s Political Summer Olympics, President Putin is on track this week to win the gold in a demanding event: Making Martyrs for the Opposition. After Putin’s election in March and his inauguration in May, protest crowds dwindled and a feeling of hopelessness settled over Russia’s democratic movement. But now, the biggest chants at rallies […]

LVIV — It’s a sunny summer evening here in Lviv, the café and cobblestones capital of Western Ukraine. But a steady stream of young couples are ducking down a secret archway. They rap once at a solid wooden door, then stand back. The door opens half way to reveal a man in forest green uniform, […]