(RFE/RL) As he does, Russian President Vladimir Putin turned to a Soviet-era pop culture reference to get his message across at one point in his 4 1/2-hour annual press conference on December 17, when responding to the only reporter from a Western country that is not Iceland who got to ask a question. […]
His remarks on the dead-serious matter of Navalny’s poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent seemed to be cast in a surreal, less-than-serious light by Putin’s long-standing refusal to utter the anti-corruption crusader’s name — a choice or habit that Sam Greene, a Russia analyst and director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London, described as “bordering on the absurd.” […]
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The Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) is a network of over 125 academics, mainly from North America and post-Soviet Eurasia, advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster a community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research