Leonid Bershidsky

The Russian Defense Ministry’s announcement on Tuesday that troops were beginning to relocate to their permanent bases after drills on the Ukrainian border is not yet the denouement of the crisis that Russian President Vladimir Putin created and then US President Joe Biden amplified with alarmist…

Crypto is seemingly everywhere in 2022. The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is still above $2 trillion despite some recent losses. In 2021, people spent more than $44 billion on non-fungible tokens, or virtual ownership rights on digital objects — an amount that approached the total size…

From Russian President Vladimir Putin’s point of view, last week’s unrest in Kazakhstan was a godsend just as negotiations with the US over Russia’s security demands were about to start in Geneva. With an instant deployment of an unnecessary “peacekeeping force,” and now a planned rapid withdrawal,…

The Soviet Union officially ended 30 years ago — if one had to pick a specific date, then on Dec. 25, 1991, with the lowering of the Soviet flag from the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace and the handover of the nuclear button from the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the first…

When Czar Peter the Great was passing through the town of Gardelegen during one of his long European trips that opened Russia to the West, the notoriously heavy drinker was so taken with the local beer, the Garley (or Garlei, as it was then spelled), that he declared it the best drink in the world…

When Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, General Kyrylo Budanov, names specific dates for a Russian march on his country — late January or early February — it’s hard to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin will stick to Budanov’s schedule as if it were embossed on an RSVP card. As I’ve…

In a previous column, I allowed myself to daydream about Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of Facebook Inc.’s main app. It may have sounded implausible at the time, but now Zuckerberg appears to share my dream at a certain level: He’s working on a wholesale solution to Facebook’s endless public…

When US President Joe Biden revives the trope of Russia as a declining power with an economy that produces little except oil and gas, Americans should hope he doesn’t really believe it. That it’s untrue is only half the problem; when US leaders repeat that depiction, they invite trouble, for…

Ukraine may rarely be on the front pages anymore, but it remains one of the world’s most important countries, its domestic struggles echoing far and wide (remember the second Trump impeachment? It won’t be the last such echo). The main reason for that importance is Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Germany’s biggest tabloid, Bild, has reported a major hacking attack from Russia on the German banking system and naming “the state Russian hackers from the ‘Fancy Lazarus’ group” as the culprits. If the attack really took place — there is no official confirmation so far — it will, as usual, be…