The controversy caused by Georgia's Eurovision Song Contest entry seems to be over (or, depending on one's perspective, has reached its climax), now that Georgia has decided not to take part in this year's event in Moscow, following the European Broadcasting Union's demand that the l...

Below is a partial translation of a post (RUS) on health care in Russia - a caustic “unsent letter” to the Russian president, written by LJ user sobe-panek on Feb. 22. The post has made it into the Top 30 at Yandex Blogs portal and was picked up by some Russian media. […] There is ...

This has been a pretty turbulent week in Ukraine: on Tuesday, the parliament fired Volodymyr Ohryzko, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, and on Wednesday, riot police stormed the Kyiv headquarters of Naftogaz, the Ukrainian national energy company. Ukrainiana wrote this about the foreign affairs ...

U.S. president Barack Obama is planning to visit Great Britain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic next month, during his first trip to Europe since taking office. In a post titled “They all want to meet him,” P O Neill of A Fistful of Euros writes this about the upcoming visit: An i...

Megan Case 2.0 writes on Russia's Eurovision victory: “I think that Russia should have pulled out all the stops and filled the stage with famous people - they could have had Maria Sharapova hitting tennis balls into the audience, and the whole of Zenit (St. Petersburg’s football/soccer t...

Victory Day was as much of an event in the Russian blogosphere as it was in the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities on May 9. LJ user kkk147 went for a morning bike ride and happened upon the departure of missiles, tanks and other heavy weaponry for the military parade on Red Square. He wrote...

On Wednesday, Dmitry Medvedev became Russia's third post-Soviet president. LJ user kozenko - Andrey Kozenko, journalist for the Russian daily Kommersant - wrote this (RUS) about the legacy of the outgoing president, Vladimir Putin: […] I feel all but indifferent about Putin's departure...

On April 13, Oleg Panfilov - LJ user oleg_panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations - reposted an item (RUS) from a Central Asian news agency Ferghana.ru on the dismantling of the International Friendship Monument in downtown Tashkent. The news got many people upset: ther...

Moscow Through Brown Eyes posts a short update on hate crime in Moscow; Window on Eurasia writes about a graffiti campaign launched by the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) in Moscow “in order to call attention to the strength of the group and to intimidate its opponents, migrant wor...

Ilyas Shurpaev, a 32-year-old TV journalist and blogger (LJ user shurpaev), was found strangled in the apartment he was renting in Moscow Friday. (More detailed English-language media accounts of the murder are here.) A native of Dagestan, Shurpaev had been based in Makhachkala until very recently, ...