Robert Service is among the world’s most authoritative historians of Soviet and Russian history and the author of books including biographies of Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin as well as 2019’s “Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin.” He is emeritus professor of Russian history at Oxford and a senior fellow at the...
Author: Vazha Tavberidze / RFE/RL
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to be remembered as a great ruler of Russia. History professor Timothy Snyder believes he will rather go down as a ruler who severely weakened his own country by choosing to have the West as an enemy and China as a patron. Mr. Snyder, an author and expert on Central...
David Ignatius is a veteran journalist and an associate editor and foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, as well as the author of 11 novels, including the 2007 spy thriller, “Body Of Lies.” He has written extensively in his twice-weekly columns about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and chats twice a month with Washington Post...
Jonathan Littell is a French-American writer and journalist. His 2006 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, was critically acclaimed. In the 1990s, he was in Grozny during the First Chechen War and in the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia during the second...
Michael McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is currently a professor of international studies at Stanford University. He is an author of numerous books and articles and a former special assistant to the U.S. president on Russian and Eurasian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council. Mr. McFaul spoke...
David Bramlette is a former U.S. Army Ranger and Green Beret who commanded a team in Ukraine’s Foreign Legion for 10 months last year. He currently works for the Romulus T. Weatherman Foundation, a non-governmental organization that leads operations in Ukraine to identify, recover and repatriate Americans killed in action. In an interview from Kyiv...
Roman Anin, a Russian investigative journalist who worked for Novaya Gazeta, was among the founders of the independent iStories outlet in 2020. He has taught journalism in Moscow and worked with international networks including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). In addition to his work...
Francis Fukayama is a U.S. political scientist at Stanford University. He is perhaps best known for his 1992 essay “The End of History,” in which he argued that the struggle between ideologies was at an end. RFE/RL’s Georgian Service interviewed Mr. Fukuyama after his recent appearance at the Economic Policy Research Center in Tbilisi, Georgia....
British Army Col. Hamish Stephen de Bretton-Gordon is a military analyst who formerly commanded North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.K. chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear reaction troops. He is a regular commentator for Britain’s The Telegraph and elsewhere on Russia’s 14-month-old, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He spoke recently with RFE/RL’s Geor-gian Service about whether...
Retired four-star Gen. David Petraeus is a veteran of nearly four decades in the U.S. Army, commanding U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan before serving as director of the CIA in 2011-2012. In an interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, Mr. Petraeus argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “about as clear a right-versus-wrong as we’ve...
Gen. Richard Barrons, a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command, is now chairman of the defense and security company, Universal Defense and Security Solutions. During an interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, he spoke about the constraints on both sides of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the importance of industrial transformation in a drawn-out...
Political consultant Abbas Gallyamov used to be one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speechwriters. In an interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, he discussed the back-and-forth with the Russian president over drafting a text – and his perhaps surprising pick for Putin’s successor. RFE/RL: How was your time as a speechwriter for Vladimir Putin? What was...