Remembering Gorbachev
In early January 1997, I met my boyhood hero. It was in the grounds of his wintry dacha outside Moscow.…
Can Moldova resist Russia’s embrace?
At the Cathedral of the Nativity, in the middle of Moldova’s capital Chisinau, many of those bowed in prayer before…
There’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary Russian’
There was a whiteboard in the BBC Baghdad bureau for noting down phrases we hoped to ban from the airwaves.…
Putin’s cult of war
This idolisation of the Soviet military is Russia’s modern tragedy. Not least because it is crucial to Putin’s way of…
Is Putin in pain?
Is Vladimir Putin in pain? Until now, there has been plenty of chatter about the wellbeing of his minister of…
Why are elite Russian musicians backing Putin?
A world away from the stupendous horror perpetrated by Russian forces in Bucha and Kramatorsk, a parallel conflict is being…
Russia's failure to communicate
‘So you’ve got one, right, Chris?’ Lev Lvovich leaned in closer, and his beery breath was warm and damp on…
Russia ‘realists’ have very little to say about evil
‘Every way of a man is right in his own eyes’, the Book of Proverbs says: it makes us feel…
Russia’s ‘denazification’ project is only just beginning
Truth, infamously, is the first casualty of war. But the truth, in modern Russia, was critically wounded before it got…
The true story about Russian lying
We were having a few drinks in a rented flat in the centre of Grozny in late 1994. A bunch…
Is this Putin's 'off ramp' out of Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin will soon have to select the version of defeat that suits him best. His plan A – a…
It doesn’t matter if Putin is mad
Mike Tyson put it simply: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’. And Vladimir Putin has…
