A mission from the International Monetary Fund began working in Minsk on Wednesday and on its very first day received an official request for a loan from the Belarusian government and National Bank. The exact size of Belarus’s appetite is...

… On 24 May, the Moscow City Court finally opened hearings in a cassation appeal by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev against the sentence handed down by Judge Viktor Danilkin. The hearings had been postponed a week earlier, as the...

Waves have once again gone flickering across the surface this beloved swamp we call home. More than three months remain until the official start of Duma election campaigns, and already the first big “gurgle, plop and rat-a-tat-tat” have...

Irina Khalip, our special correspondent in Minsk, used to write a regular column called Candidate for First Lady. At the time, of course, nobody knew that she and her husband, Belarusian presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, would end up...

Israeli military attaché, Colonel Vadim Leiderman, was detained by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officials in Moscow on 12 May following a business lunch with an unnamed Russian citizen, accused of espionage and immediately...

It would be difficult to call the ruling party a party of the people: most of the richest State Duma deputies are members of United Russia. Moreover, an analysis of their tax declarations shows that it was feasible for some of the people’s...

The establishment of the Popular Front by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was a signal: “I will be president”. The most amazing part of the Popular Front, however, was its facelessness. Bus loads of little known organisation heads travelled...

“I shall not speak of the lack of grounds for my recall, but about political freedom,” Sergei Mirnonov said on Wednesday, while speaking at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. Well, he got his freedom: 43 deputies of the municipal...

The Arab revolutions have dealt another blow at Swiss banking secrecy, thought to be immutable for over seventy years. The Swiss Confederation has had to freeze the assets of toppled dictators, causing concern to many people who keep their...

Irina Khalip, Novaya Gazeta’s correspondent in Belarus, has been convicted of “participating in group actions in gross violation of public law and order” and has been sentenced to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years. Sergey...

On Tuesday 17 May, those who are following the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev had a strong sense of déjà vu. Just as, in December last year, Judge Danilkin postponed reading out the sentence on both businessmen...

All these months I’ve been trying to understand why I was first kept at the pre-trial detention centre and then under house arrest. Why keep a woman with a child under lock and key? But after my husband told the judges they had threatened...

The Right Cause party has made up its mind about its new leader. It was revealed on Sunday that Russian business tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov had agreed to head up the party. He was not previously spotted engaging in political activities,...

What new can be said about how the two heads of the Byzantine eagle, having spread their wings over Russia (just as the one-headed Pobedonostsev did at one time, but with owl wings, if the poet is to be believed), have begun pecking at one...

Former Belarusian presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov has been sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison. Government charges of “organising mass riots” called for seven years of imprisonment. Fellow protesters Ilia...