April 19:
Is an end to the long-running saga over Nadia Savchenko in sight? Germany's Deutche Welle reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have talked by phone and discussed a potential prisoner swap. The notional arrangement tentatively agreed upon by the two leaders would see Savchenko, who has been convicted of murder by a Moscow court, repatriated to Ukraine in exchange for the release of two Russian military officers captured there, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev.
April 20:
Has the Kremlin now set its sights on South Ossetia? According to RosBalt, President Putin has said that his government will need to "think further" about the possibility of incorporating the breakaway Georgian province - over which Moscow and Tbilisi fought a war in 2008 - into the Russian Federation. Putin made the comment during his annual call-in interview program with the public, during which he further intimated that South Ossetian President Leonid Tibilov is considering a referendum for the region similar to the one held by the Crimean Peninsula in the spring of 2014, which set the stage for formal absorption by Russia.
April 21:
Just days after its creation, Russia's new National Guard may already be on the cusp of a significant expansion of its political power. The Moscow Times reports that the State Duma's Committee on Defense is contemplating amendments to prevailing Russian law which would give the new super-agency the right to shoot at crowds of people in order to combat terrorism and large-scale unrest. "We believe that in these cases the risk of harming random individuals will be justified," the Committee has formally explained.
The step is an unusual one. The National Guard was established by Presidential decree, notes Yekaterina Schulmann of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, "and traditionally they are not revised," "If there will be any changes made, they will have to be made at the initiative of [National Guard chief Viktor] Zolotov himself, not the deputies." The move does, however, indicate the Duma's extensive support for Putin's latest initiative.
April 22:
President Putin's newest project, the National Guard, has become the source of considerable trepidation among the country's citizens. Novaya Gazeta reports on the findings of a joint study carried out by the paper and the TSIMES research institute via Russian social media, which documented that nearly half of all respondents (46.9%) believed that the main goal of the new agency is "the protection of the president and his organs of power" in the event of potential mass unrest. Only 15 percent of the more than 15,000 Russian netizens polls believed that the Kremlin's stated rationale for the creation of the Guard - a strengthening of state capabilities against the threat of terrorism - was in fact true.
[EDITORS' NOTE: Given the effect of Russia's increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
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