MACIEJ ZANIEWICZ: After watching your film, Who is Mr. Putin, one gets the sense that the whole Russian political system today grew out of the criminal world of the 1990s, which was created by Vladimir Putin himself.

ANASTASIA KIRILENKO: When Putin was a presidential candidate in 2000, journalists rushed to explain who he was. I remember very well the headlines: he is a man who came out of nowhere. In fact, in St Petersburg everyone knew very well who he was. There were enough criminal scandals connected to Putin. In 2000 many journalists were confused. Reporters from the Moscow Times went to St Petersburg and found people who had worked with Putin, but those people could not recall any details about what it was like to work with him.

In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What he meant by that was it is possible to fail in many ways, but there is only one way to succeed. The interesting thing about Russia’s ongoing failure, in contrast to its most famous writer’s wisdom, is that it is unrelenting in its uniformity. Nothing happening in Russia today is a surprise. It looks exactly like Russia's entire painstaking history played out year after year, decade after decade. Russian history, which is full of unique and different historical events, always seems to arrive back at the same place. 

On August 2nd, US President Donald Trump reluctantly signed tough new sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea. He had little choice since they passed both houses of the US Congress unanimously; 419 to 3 in the House of Representatives and 98 to 2 in the Senate, enabling them to block any presidential veto if Trump had decided not to sign them into law.

Interview with Mark Galeotti,  a senior researcher at UMV, the Institute of International Relations Prague. Interviewer: Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska. 

In order to understand the wide-reaching implications of post-truth, one should first look at its sources. Alternative facts and post-truth have been used by governments, such as that of Russia, in the strategic shaping of national identity. In the initial hours and days after unexpected events, elite-level individuals play a decisive role in framing the mainstream interpretations despite the utter lack of concrete information. Even after further information comes out, the wider public will perceive it in the context of previously constructed narratives. In terms of social media, Twitter acts as ground zero for shaping interpretations due to its immediacy and the limited size of its posts.

This article originally appeared in "Meanwhile in the Baltics...", a collection of articles written by the graduates of 2016 Solidarity Academy - Baltic Sea Youth Dialogue, organised by the European Solidarity Centre in partnership with the Council of the Baltic Sea States.

This piece originally appeared in Issue 2/2017 of New Eastern Europe. Subscribe now.

Casting aside a longstanding tradition of American exceptionalism, Trump is remaking the United States into a more consumer-friendly version of autocratic Russia. This is alarming and deeply demoralising. But it could also suggest that the American and Russian societies now simply share the same underlying plight.

For most observers, the current state of the Russian opposition is simultaneously despondent and hopeful, defeated and resurgent. On March 26th, thousands of people came out to protest against corruption and express their anger at Vladimir Putin’s regime. The demonstrations were catalyzed by Alexei Navalny’s exposé of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s offshore accounts, yachts and vineyards that he secretly owns at a time of economic decline and expenditure cuts.

Late Saturday, the President of the United States Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone call. The Kremlin gave an official statement mentioning “the fight against terrorism, the situation in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, strategic stability and non-proliferation, the situation with Iran’s nuclear programme, and the Korean Peninsula issue,” adding that aspects of the Ukraine crisis had also been discussed. Its tone was typical of official statements from any country.

This piece originally appeared in Issue 1/2017 of New Eastern Europe. Subscribe now.