December 17:
As NATO increasingly ponders expansion, Russian officials are stepping up their rhetorical attacks on the Alliance. In comments carried by RT, State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin called NATO a "cancerous tumor on the whole European continent," and urged that it be "dissolved." Naryshkin, a United Russia deputy and a close ally of the Kremlin, made the remarks during meetings in Moscow with Serbian lawmakers, who are similarly critical of the prospects of NATO's expansion to include Montenegro.
Naryshkin's sentiment, however, if far from unique. Viktor Ozerov, the head of the Federation Council's Committee for Defense and Security, has likewise warned publicly that Montenegro's entry into the Alliance could prompt Moscow to scale back joint projects, including military initiatives, with the Balkan nation.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has charged that, after months of diminished fighting, Russia is once again increasing its military presence in eastern Ukraine. According to the Associated Press, Poroshenko told reporters during a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels that there is now "growing military presence of Russia in the region, in particular in the Donbass." Russian President Vladimir Putin, Poroshenko noted, has become increasingly public about his government's intervention in Ukraine, admitting publicly for the first time that Russia has personnel "performing military tasks" on the territory of its neighbor.
December 14:
Investigative reporting is increasingly pulling back the curtain on Russian President Vladimir Putin's notoriously opaque private life. London's Telegraph newspaper reports on recent coverage of Kirill Shamalov, who is believed to have married Putin's younger - and largely unknown - daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, in a secret ceremony back in 2013. Since then, "Putin's son-in-law has acquired more than two billion dollars in assets," the paper notes. Shamilov, the son of an old Putin family friend, is now the Deputy Chairman of the management board of SIBUR, a prominent Russian energy conglomerate.
Deepening international isolation is making Russians increasingly reminiscent of - and sympathetic to - the Soviet past. The Associated Press reports that new "Stalin museums" which memorialize the legacy and achievements of the former Soviet strongman are cropping up throughout the country as ordinary Russians turn inward, and in the process begin to whitewash the USSR's brutality. "Of course, we have started to look at Stalin in a more favorable light," explains one tour operator. "Why now? Maybe it's because the situation in the world isn't the best. We need strength. We need something to unite us."
Falsifying academic credentials has long been accepted practice among Russian politicians and business elites alike. Now, a new watchdog group is attempting to track these lies through the use of advanced software. "The group, Dissernet, uses software developed by one of its founders, the physicist Andrei Rostovtsev, to find instances of plagiarism in doctoral theses," writes Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg. "In its three years of operation, Dissernet has uncovered dozens of scandalous cases." Among those found by the group to have falsified documents is no less a figure than Sergei Naryshkin, the current speaker of the Russian State Duma, who apparently "cribbed part of his 2004 economics thesis from an article by the well-known anti-Putin economist Vladislav Inozemtsev."
In a move sure to further exacerbate tensions with Moscow, the Ukrainian government has announced that it will not repay an estimated $3 billion in commercial debts to the Kremlin. The BBC reports that Kyiv has imposed the moratorium because of disagreements with Moscow over the terms of the repayment. The freeze will remain in place "until the acceptance of our restructuring proposals or the adoption of the relevant court decision," Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk has announced. According to him, Kyiv is "prepared for court action from the Russian side" - something which the Kremlin has threatened to initiate.
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