I am devastated by the news from Moscow. The death toll is terrible. I will not speculate about the perpetrators. Nor will I tolerate gloating comments here. One thing I will note though. After such an attack, one wants to know the truth - and this is precisely the thing the Russian authorities cannot deliver.

Despite everything, there is a tendency in the West to see Russian "elections" as actual elections.

That is, Putin's "victory" is seen as reflecting genuine popular approval of the economic performance, military successes etc.

It just doesn't work this way in dictatorships.

1/ Syria's Assad "won" with 92% of the vote while the civil war was raging across most of the country. It wasn't even clear which territories "voted" in his "elections".

Tunisia's Ben Ali "won" with 90%. A year went by and he was ousted by a popular movement.

2/

Sorry I can't stop with this tweet

You know what's especially ironic? As part of the "smart voting" strategy, Navalny called to vote for the second most popular candidate in single-seat elections across the country. That candidate was usually from... the Communist Party.

1/

https://twitter.com/Niall_Diarmuid/status/1759530258187837786

For Navalny and his team, this was a tactic in the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.

They understood full well it's impossible to replace the authorities with voting in Russia, but they believed one could make a dent in the regime's stability...

2/

Rustling through the pages of (relatively) old papers.

10 March 2022. Alexander Khramchikhin, a military expert who is highly patriotic and loyal to the Kremlin, but not devoid of common sense, struggles to find reasons for the invasion of Ukraine.

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nvo.ng.ru/realty/2022-03… He makes several points:

- Ukraine was not going to be admitted into NATO, both because of territorial conflicts with Russia and unwillingness of some NATO members to admit Ukraine.

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Ekaterina Duntsova and Russian electoral dictatorship. A 🧵

1/ Ekaterina Duntsova is a local activist and journalist from Rzhev, a small town in central Russia known mostly for the gruesome WW2 battles that happened there.

2/

Very dangerous developments in Ukraine

The conflict between Zelenskyy's office and Zaluzhnyi is apparently real. Within this conflict, people close to Zelensky leaked to WaPo what is effectively an admission that 🇺🇦 is responsible for Nord Stream.

1/

archive.is/sgzm8 The purpose of the leak is to blame Zaluzhnyi for the Nord Stream attack while claiming that Zelensky did not know about it.

2/

Alexey Navalny's team @ACF_int found this 15,000,000 EUR estate in Marbellla, Spain, owned by a Russian Duma deputy Alexey Chepa.

Chepa did not bother too much to hide his ownership - the estate is listed under the name of his 22 y.o. son.

1/ While Chepa himself is under sanctions, his family isn't. According to Navalny's team, the house looks occupied and, in all likelihood, his family members continue spending time there.

2/

This article is riddled with factual inaccuracies. The author is not aware that most Russian investment in Ukraine and elsewhere came through offshore centres such as the Netherlands, so he underestimates Russian economic influence in post-Soviet states.

https://twitter.com/immanuelness/status/1687763388833976320

He is also not aware of the details of Russia’s energy trade and its energy blackmail of Ukraine, as a result of which Ukraine actually paid a higher price for gas than some Western European countries.

What happens now is both relatively insignificant - and highly illustrative of Putin's system and its likely future.

1/ So what's happening exactly? Prigozhin has gone rogue out of sheer desperation. Behind it is a mix of frustrated ambitions and war-related psychological problems.

2/

Today the Russian parliament unanimously voted to *completely prohibit* gender transition in the country.

All medical procedures associated with it are outlawed. Changing the gender marker in the official documents is banned.

1/ Even the Ministry of Health opposed the new law, claiming that it will increase the number of suicides.

2/

Anatomy of failure

Everyone knows that the health spending in the US is mostly a private burden (carried by businesses and individual citizens).

1/ The share of public spending in the overall health expenditure in the US is among the lowest in the OECD group - 51%, as compared to 71% OECD average.

In other words, the US government forces companies and individuals to carry half of the burden of healthcare directly.

2/

Mikhail has remained in Russia despite multiple not-so-subtle hints to pack his stuff and go. Strategically, as well as morally, I understand his decision because I see the work on the ground that he's been doing (he's no Kasparov alright...)

1/

https://twitter.com/muzh_Zapolskoy/status/1659130288037941248

Yes, it's risky and yes, it's almost certain to lead to the regime's response. But someone has to do it if one is serious at all about political change in Russia. (Again, contrary to Kasparov's vile nonsense.)

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Still can't stop cataloguing losses...

In a new policy paper for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung I explore the negative consequences of the war for the social situation in Russia.

1/

russia.fes.de/en/events/russ… I focus on five dimensions of the social crisis: 1) poverty and declining living standards, 2) the impact on industrial areas, 3) supply and personnel problems in healthcare, 4) troubles in the non-governmental sector, 5) demographic decline.

2/

So many bad takes on Putin-Xi summit here based on wishful thinking.

The summit is a huge win for Putin and makes Xi dependent on him - not the other way round.

1/ The most important thing that came out of the summit was Xi expressing his full confidence that Putin would win in 2024 elections (with Putin never even publicly committing that he would run).

2/

Russian budget is apparently in deep trouble. The government finally agreed on a "windfall tax" of 4-5% on "excess profits" of non-energy companies, hoping to collect some 300 bln rubles in revenue.

1/ Before the war, such attempts (announced by individual public officials such as Andrei Belousov) were easily repelled by the organized big business. The government's overall strategy was to minimize any sudden changes to the tax regime - and they took this goal seriously.

2/

The latest issue of Russian Politics journal is dedicated to the evolution of the Russian political-economic order.

Together with Oleg Zhuravlev we contributed an article on the (mostly failed) attempts at building a developmental state in Russia.

1/

brill.com/view/journals/… Contrary to some authors, we don't see Russia solely as a "kleptocracy" where everything revolves around rent-seeking. For one, if it were true, the war would not have happened - one of its consequences is the radical reduction in rent sources for corrupt public officials.

2/

So let's talk about Alexei Navalny for a little bit.

I will share some simple observations below ⬇️

1/ For a long time, there was a talk in Russia that Navalny was a Kremlin creature. "Why is he so much more popular than the other opposition leaders? Why isn't he in prison?"

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I no longer work at a university in Russia, but my colleagues shared with me some of the student essays they received recently. It's heartbreaking to see how propaganda and societal pressures destroy the ability to think logically.

1/ In my experience, freshman students come to the university with some preconceived notions, but curiosity and the desire to learn something new combined with the teaching efforts of the whole faculty win over propagandistic tropes.

2/

And now in English. In August 2022, my colleagues and me launched the New School of Political Science. This is an online educational initiative intended to save civic and political education in Russia from the ruin that beset it last year. Classes are taught by Russians primarily for the Russian audience. However, in spring semester this year, we offer an English-language class on Russian politics.

This article does an amazing job demonstrating the complexity of the conflict pre-Feb 24. It does not answer the question why Putin launched the invasion, but it explains why the Minsk process was going nowhere.

1/

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… Still, as the author makes clear, even with the failure of Minsk, the invasion was only one of Putin's options (the absolute worst one at that).

2/

On the surface, the oil price cap is a success. Russian oil supply is basically kept stable, preventing a global hike in prices, however, the discount that Russia has to make on its oil increased, thus reducing FX inflows in the country.

1/ In fact, the Urals spot price is hovering right below the $60 mark. I'm guessing non-Western buyers assure Putin they do not observe the price cap. They just demand a discount so that the actual price is below $60 :)

2/