Boris Sokolov

Many in Russia regard the approaching FIFA World Cup as a disaster. With reason as the Russian authorities have decided to do even better than their Soviet predecessors who ordered Moscow, Kyiv, Leningrad and other cities that hosted the 1980 Summer Games purged of all “suspect” and...

Aleksei Navalny’s rallies of protest against Putin’s fourth term as president were predictably ruthlessly suppressed by riot police in Moscow and several other Russian cities. A total of 1,600 persons were detained, including 704 in Moscow (among them Mr. Navalny) and 229 in St....

The 2018 Russian presidential election featured an exceptionally sluggish, pro forma campaign, which could not be enlivened even by clown-like acts, and a predictable result which was known in advance, several months before the voting day. Because of the non-systemic opposition leader Alexei...

There has been more and more talk in the world lately about the possibility of deploying UN peacekeepers in the Donbas. In particular, Iryna Lutsenko, representative of Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko in the Verkhovna Rada, says that the UN peacekeeping mission force in the Donbas may...

As it was expected, another round of the Donbas negotiations between Kurt Volker, the US Special Representative for Ukraine, and the Russian president’s aide Vladimir Surkov, held on January 26 in Dubai, produced no results. The US representative characterized the talks as “open...

Since late 2016, the Kremlin has been trying to make up its mind concerning the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik coup d’etat in St. Petersburg [known as the “Great October Revolution” under the Soviets. – Ed.]. The impression is that they hadn’t figured out...

The 15th anniversary of the tragedy in the theater center at Dubrovka, where on October 23, 2002, Movsar Barayev-led Chechen terrorists took more than 900 hostages from among the artists and spectators of the musical Nord-Ost, is passing almost unnoticed in Russia. This is despite the...

After two fighters of a Russian private military company (PMC) “Wagner” acquired global notoriety following their capture by the Islamists in Syria, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officially served a belated notice of suspicion to the company’s leader Dmitry Utkin, who uses...

The governments and public opinions of the countries that took part in the Second World War have tended to overstate their wartime losses, especially where and when such statistics were hard to ascertain. The Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation have been the only exception from the rule....

Undoubtedly, August 1991, when an almost bloodless revolution in Russia put an end to the communist regime and triggered the factual collapse of the USSR, was by far the most important period in my life. For I not only watched the course of history at the time, but was also taking a personal part...