Russia

In the Picture: Eurovision and Euro Divisions

May 17, 2013 7:05 pm by Amie Tsang

It’s a competition with some questionable talent, scorned for its lack of taste, and yet the Eurovision Song Contest has an audience of 125m and brings pundits out in force to discuss what is says about the state of Europe today. With this year’s final coming up this Saturday in Malmö, Sweden, we give you the best pieces on how it works and why Europeans care, so that you can mingle with confidence at Eurovision parties.

Did we mention it is seen as a proxy for the political situation in Europe? The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote in 2008: “With both Eurovision and the EU, expansion has had a similar effect – west Europeans complain that they no longer recognise a club that they founded, and that they continue to fund.”
Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s film critic, was also struck by the idea of Eurovision as a metaphor – “what Eurovision delivers is flavorless processed cheese, as if it were produced not by musicians but by a cultural subcommittee of the European Union, convened in a back room in Brussels.”

Tags: Azerbaijan, Cyprus, eurovision, Georgia, Nil Points, Russia, UK, Ukraine
Posted in Europe, Foreign affairs | Permalink

Smart Reads May 9, 2013

May 9, 2013 1:26 pm by Amie Tsang

♦ We love our multilateral organisations here at the FT, so we’ve taken a close look at how Roberto Azevêdo managed to win the WTO DG nomination – visiting a mere 47 countries along the way. Mr Azevêdo struck a pragmatic note in an in interview with the FT, saying a year-end Bali meeting would focus on the “do-able”: “It’s… about instilling confidence that we can still negotiate, that we can still deliver multilaterally.”
♦ After David Cameron welcomed Uhuru Kenyatta to London this week, Richard Dowden considers the diplomatic earthquake that could occur when Kenyatta is expected to report to the ICC. Will Britain “abandon the ICC or isolate their closest political and security ally in East and the Horn of Africa”? Will Kenyatta run the country from a Dutch prison using Skype?
♦ Israel has warned the US about an imminent Russian deal to sell ground-to-air missile systems to Syria.
♦ US military camouflage has developed from two types to 10, just one example of inefficient duplication between different government agencies.
♦ Arguably the most haunting photograph of the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh. Read more

Tags: Bali, Bangladesh, David Cameron, ICC, Israel, Kenya, missile, Roberto Azevêdo, Russia, Syria, Uhuru Kenyatta, US foreign policy, US military, WTO
Posted in Smart Reads | Permalink

Smart Reads May 2, 2013

May 2, 2013 1:51 pm by Amie Tsang

♦ Ireland’s head of state says the EU must drop its “hegemonic” economic model and reform the ECB, or risk social upheaval and a loss of popular legitimacy.
♦ The Great Tax Race series turns to Ireland, looking at how Ireland has remained attached to aggressive tax policies that favour businesses even as ordinary people have struggled to get by. (If you’re trying to get your head around how all of this even works, watch this handy explainer from Matt Steinglass)
♦ Richard McGregor thinks President Obama needs to circumvent Congress if he wants to get his agenda moving.
♦ Western clothing companies are scrambling to address public concerns over working conditions in Bangladesh – the Walt Disney Company ordered an end to the production of branded merchandise in the country before Rana Plaza collapsed. John Gapper today makes the argument against western companies withdrawing: “Despite everything, the industry provides better-paid jobs than the alternative – working on rural farms – and has helped to emancipate women.”
♦ Despite violence and corruption, Afghan entrepreneurs are still making opportunities for themselves.
♦ The Kremlin is putting pressure on VKontakte, a Russian Facebook clone, pushing CEO Pavel Durov to leave the country.
♦ Slate is publishing a series of excerpts from the memoirs of Mohamedou Oul Slahi who was a prisoner at Guantánamo for nearly 11 years.
♦ Mafia historian goes underground into the bunkers of the Ndrangheta, Europe’s biggest cocaine traffickers and Italy’s most powerful organised crime group. Read more

Tags: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Barack Obama, corporate tax, Disney, ECB, EU, Facebook, factories, Guantanamo, Ireland, Italy, Kremlin, Mafia, Ndrangheta, Pavel Durov, Russia, tax, VKontakte
Posted in Foreign affairs, Smart Reads | Permalink

Smart Reads April 11, 2013

April 11, 2013 12:36 pm by Amie Tsang

♦ Cuts to welfare payments in the UK will hit northern communities as much as five times as hard as the Conservative heartlands of the south. Take a look at the FT’s Austerity Audit interactive to see all the research and reporting on the effects of the current government’s radical reforms.

♦ Brazil is grappling with a Congress where “foxes” are often in charge of the henhouse.

♦ The Egyptian armed forces participated in forced disappearances, torture and killings during the 2011 uprising, despite publicly declaring their neutrality.

♦ Mona Eltahawy explains why satire is a serious subject in Egypt: “What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless? And what is revolution if not the ultimate act of derision against the established powers.”

♦ Marc Lynch wonders if his initial assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood was wrong: “both academics and policymakers need to recognize that the lessons of the past no longer apply so cleanly, and that many of the analytical conclusions developed during the Mubarak years are obsolete.”

♦ Robert Driessen, one of the world’s most successful art forgers, tells his story (from Thailand, out of the reach of European authorities).

♦ Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who plans to run in the 2018 presidential election, will be put on trial next week. Georgy Bovt explains why he will go to jail. Read more

Tags: Alexei Navalny, art, austerity, Brazil, Egypt, military, Muslim Brotherhood, Robert Driessen, Russia, UK
Posted in Smart Reads | Permalink

Smart Reads April 2, 2013

April 2, 2013 3:08 pm by Amie Tsang

Life’s a beach for Russians in Cyprus, who are keeping calm about their financial woes.
David Stockman, a former budget director for Ronald Reagan, is fearful for the future of capitalism in the US: “Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.”
Louisa Lombard examines the rise of Michel Djotodia, the new president of the Central African Republic, and looks at whether he might represent a new chapter in the the country’s politics.
The New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe writes about the culture at Vice Media, where a publication that is “a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum” is growing its commercial and journalistic ambitions.
Stephan Haggard lays out North Korea’s action and rhetoric, and explains that “it is not clear that the North is in fact escalating in the traditional sense of the term; the game is largely declaratory and rhetorical.”
Kigeli V Ndahindurwa, the last king of Rwanda, is living in low-income housing in the US state of Virginia and longing to return to the throne.

Tags: bailout, capitalism, Central African Republic, Cyprus, David Stockman, North Korea, Russia, Rwanda, Vice Media
Posted in Smart Reads | Permalink

Boris Berezovsky: a reading list

March 25, 2013 8:20 pm by Esther Bintliff

Boris Berezovsky in August 2012 (Getty)

Police have found “no evidence” so far that anyone else was involved in the death of exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, but are retaining “an open mind”, according to one of the detectives working on the case. It’s hardly surprising that questions remain. While one friend told the FT: “In the last few months, he was very depressed, very low. He felt beset by all the issues that surrounded him”, another – Nikolai Glushkov, a fellow Russian exile – told the Guardian’s Luke Harding: “I will never believe in the natural death of Boris Berezovsky.” It may be a while before any certainty is reached [update: police said late on Monday that a postmortem found the cause of death was “consistent with hanging”] – but in the meantime, it’s worth reading up on the life of a man whose influence over his homeland will be felt for a long time to come.

Owen Matthews recalls his first meeting with Berezovsky in 1998, at the “luxurious Logovaz Club, a restored prerevolutionary mansion in central Moscow”. In a piece full of pithy assessments (“Yeltsin may have made Russia free, but it was Berezovsky who made it for sale”; “Berezovsky was Dr. Frankenstein, whose monster was a poker-faced little KGB officer”), Matthews paints a vivid picture of the mathmetician-turned-kingmaker whose love of power contributed to his undoing.

Berezovsky posted a message on Facebook last year, asking his fellow Russians to forgive him for bringing Vladimir Putin to power. The Economist suggests that he sealed his own fall from grace by not only choosing Putin as Yeltsin’s successor, but by making a big deal of it. “Berezovsky… publicised his influence on Mr Putin’s appointment as Yeltsin’s successor so openly that he left Mr Putin with no choice but to kick him out.”

Writing for the FT, Ben Judah contrasts the Berezovsky of old – “they called him ‘the comet’, because he burnt so bright and talked so fast” – with the “insecure, self-doubting and anguished man” of recent months.

Tags: Boris Berezovsky, Boris Yeltsin, Kremlin, Moscow, oligarchs, Roman Abramovich, Russia, UK, Vladimir Putin
Posted in Foreign affairs | Permalink

Dinner with Medvedev: a conversation on Cyprus, Depardieu and democracy

March 21, 2013 12:00 pm by Neil Buckley

For a man who suffered the indignity of having to stand down after one term as president of Russia to make way for the return of Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev appears comfortable in his own skin.

Meeting the Financial Times and representatives of six other European newspapers this week, Russia’s prime minister seemed relaxed, sometimes jocular – in spite of the pressures many political observers believe he is under. Compared with the somewhat tense and nervous figure the FT first interviewed just after his election as president in 2008, he seems comfortable with the trappings of power – even if they are now diminished from what they were.

Today, a conservative or hardline faction in the Kremlin, emboldened by Putin’s return to the presidency, is seen as jostling to replace the more liberal Medvedev with its own premier. Putin, too, is thought ready to jettison Medvedev as a scapegoat in the event of a crisis such as an economic slowdown – and Russia’s economy has got off to a weak start this year.

For now, the premier remains in the same Gorky-9 compound he occupied as president, in which Boris Yeltsin spent his second presidential term, just off the chic Rublyovskoye Shosse 15km beyond Moscow’s outer ring road. Read more

Tags: Cyprus, democracy, Dmitry Medvedev, energy, EU, Gerard Depardieu, Kremlin, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Posted in Russia | Permalink

China’s expanding horizons under Xi Jinping

March 19, 2013 5:46 pm by Gideon Rachman

Xi Jinping (Getty)

Fresh from his “surprise” election as president of China last week, Xi Jinping is about to set off on his first foreign trip. Later this week, he will travel to Moscow. The choice is a traditional one, and redolent of the Cold War, when Russia and China were the twin pillars of the Communist world.

Back then, China was the junior partner in the relationship. These days, although the Russians would be reluctant to acknowledge it, China is the more important partner – simply because of the sheer size and dynamism of its economy.

That said, there is a time lag in the way the two countries behave on the international stage. Russia is no longer a superpower, but still has the instinct to demand a central role in the settlement of the big international issues – just look at the role that the Russians have assumed over Syria. By contrast, China is an emerging superpower, but is still loath to take the lead on international issues outside of its immediate neighbourhood. Read more

Tags: China, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping
Posted in China, Russia | Permalink

Does Vladimir Putin need to watch his right flank?

March 13, 2013 7:56 pm by Charles Clover

Allegations of election rigging are nothing new in Russia. But a new study of ballot box fraud has provoked strident denunciations from Kremlin circles – because it has emerged from a corner of the regime least expected.

The study was prepared by a little-known thinktank called the Centre for Analysis of Problems and Public Governance, which concludes that accounting for electoral fraud, the opposition Communist Party should have won the 2011 Duma elections with 30 per cent of the vote, rather than the Kremlin-backed United Russia. UR officially took 49 per cent, but the study says it should have got 22 per cent, according to versions of the report leaked to the press.

The study also concluded that Vladimir Putin would have still won the presidential poll in March, but with 52 per cent rather than 65 percent of the vote.

These conclusions, questioning the legitimacy of the ruling party, and the mandate of Mr Putin, would probably have been stomached had they been raised by an opposition group.

But it turns out the Centre is connected to the solid core of the Kremlin. It’s a right-wing thinktank associated with a branch of Putin’s circle known as the “Orthodox Chekisti” for their links to the Orthodox church and their professional backgrounds in the Soviet era security services (“Chekist” in Russian is slang for spy). The Centre’s scientific director is Vladimir Yakunin, chief of Russia’s state railway monopoly, who owns a country house in the same compound as Putin on Lake Komsomolskoe near St Petersburg. Read more

Tags: Communist party, Duma, election fraud, Kremlin, Russia, United Russia, Vladimir Putin
Posted in Russia | Permalink

Smart Reads March 5, 2013

March 5, 2013 3:09 pm by Amie Tsang

Switzerland’s relationship with the rich is under strain – though a divorce is unlikely.
Sergei Ignatiev has been a silent presence at the helm of the Russian central bank for 11 years. The end of his term and the question of succession has “gripped Russian markets, turning the central bank into a hive of intrigue”.
Chinese citizens are increasingly going online to vent their anger over pollution, forcing the government to respond.
There may be great hopes for Xi Jinping, but this year’s parliamentary session is “likely to disappoint anyone who hopes for serious root and branch reform of China’s current political or economic structure”, argues Jamil Anderlini.
A cracking opportunity for nut puns: Iranians are boycotting pistachios even as Persian new year approaches, blaming Iran’s plummeting currency and high inflation.
Drone strikes by the Pakistani military are being falsely attributed to the CIA to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public, according to a New York Times report.
Benjamin Netanyahu has asked for an extension to assemble a government – Time considers why it has been such a challenge.
Joseph Stiglitz says the outcome of the Italian elections has sent “a clear message to Europe’s leaders: the austerity policies that they have pursued are being rejected by voters”. He argues that it is not shortsightedness,but “an understanding that these policies are deeply misguided”.
Seeking clarity on the back-and-forth between Argentina and the US Court of Appeals over payments to Elliott Associates? Felix Salmon has recapped and explained what it all means.
Israel’s transport ministry has introduced new bus lines for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, a moved denounced as segregation – a “response to pressure from Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank but are unhappy about sharing buses with their Palestinian neighbours”.
Last but by no means least, the curious tale of Harry Dexter White, chief architect of the Bretton Woods economic system – and, apparently, a Soviet mole.

Tags: Argentina, Benjamin Netanyahu, central bank, China, drones, Elliot Associates, inflation, Iran, joseph Stiglitz, Pakistan, pollution, Russia, Sergei Ignatiev, Switzerland
Posted in Smart Reads | Permalink

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The World

Russia

In the Picture: Eurovision and Euro Divisions

Smart Reads May 9, 2013

Smart Reads May 2, 2013

Smart Reads April 11, 2013

Smart Reads April 2, 2013

Boris Berezovsky: a reading list

Dinner with Medvedev: a conversation on Cyprus, Depardieu and democracy

China’s expanding horizons under Xi Jinping

Does Vladimir Putin need to watch his right flank?

Smart Reads March 5, 2013

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