Russia has taken another step toward ensuring the safety of its citizens — and, as one might guess, toward achieving its own telecommunications self-sufficiency. According to the second package of “anti-fraud measures,” which the State Duma passed in its first reading in February, the government plans to block incoming international calls to landlines for Russians…
Category: Research Centre
“We’ll Be Closing the Windows”: The Self-Isolation of Russian Society as a Performance of a Carceral State
— How many open windows do we have in total? — They’re all open. — We don’t know when to stop. Well then, we’ll close the open windows. Yevgeny Schwartz. “To Slay the Dragon” (1944) There is a particular kind of academic ‘stagnation’: when a phenomenon is so vast and so obvious that the scientific…
In Memory of Serhiy Kokurin
Eleven years ago today — March 18, 2014 — as Putin solemnly declared the “peaceful annexation” of Crimea, a Russian sniper shot and killed Warrant Officer Serhiy Kokurin, head of logistics for the 13th Photogrammetric Center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Simferopol. Serhiy died at his post, defending his unit against an armed…
Anesthesia of Consumption and Surgery of Control: A Two-Phase Model of Authoritarian Governance of the Digital Space in Russia
Social science has long sought to explain why citizens of authoritarian states do not mount mass resistance against systems that openly restrict their rights. Traditional answers reduce to either fear of repression or ideological indoctrination. Neither, however, fully accounts for the phenomenon observed in post-Soviet Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century: the relatively…
Dmytro Yagunov: Crime and Social Control in Ukraine 2013-2025: Analysis of Transformation Under War Conditions
This study examines crime trends in Ukraine from 2013 to 2025, with particular focus on the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion beginning February 2022. The analysis reveals that Ukraine represents the first testing ground for studying modern warfare’s impact on a contemporary democratic state operating under European legal frameworks. Pre-war (2013-2021), Ukraine demonstrated consistent crime…
Sacred Imperialism: ‘Traditional Values’ and the Continuity of Russian Colonial Policy
This article examines how the concept of ‘traditional values’ functions as the main instrument of Russian neocolonial policy, transforming from domestic conservative rhetoric into a national ideology legitimising territorial conquest, human rights violations, and imperial expansion. Through critical discourse analysis of Presidential Decree № 809 (Russia, 2022) and related legislative acts, supplemented by examination of…
Foreign Aggression, Own ‘Operation’: How Russia Appropriated the Language of International Law
At the end of February 2026, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a series of official statements in connection with the start of military operations by the United States and Israel against Iran. These documents are a masterpiece of diplomatic hypocrisy, which is worth analysing in detail. The Russian Foreign Ministry ‘strongly condemned’ the attack on…
Carthago Delenda Est
Two millennia ago, Roman senator Cato the Elder returned from a trip to Carthage and saw a city rebuilt after defeat. From that moment on, he invariably ended every speech he made in the Senate, regardless of the topic — finance, agriculture or urban trade — with one phrase: ‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’ —…
Those Who Fail to Learn the Lessons of Their Own Gulag are Building a New One
In February 2026, the Moscow authorities officially announced that a ‘Museum of Memory for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People’ would open on the site of the Gulag History Museum. The same building, the same halls — but a fundamentally different memorial logic. Instead of documenting the crimes of the Soviet state…
The Siege Society: Russia’s Carceral State and the Reproduction of Imperial War
An analysis of contemporary Russia through the prism of the concept of a carceral state allows us to rethink the nature of its outwardly aggressive behaviour. A carceral state is not just a set of repressive institutions directed inward toward society; it is a special form of socio-political organisation where discipline, coercion, and fear serve…