Leonid Bershidsky

Russian President Vladimir Putin rarely appeals directly to citizens of the West for acceptance of and friendly cooperation with Russia. Ever since his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, his tone has been more defiant than conciliatory. And yet on June 22, the 80th anniversary of…

Artificial intelligence should be hard to squeeze into the antiquated framework of nation-state competition. AI is not a territory, a scarce resource or a fiercely protected technology like nuclear weaponry; it’s theoretically borderless thanks to abundant open research; the physical raw…

When Google renamed itself Alphabet Inc. in 2015, co-founder Larry Page revealed that one of the new name’s meanings was a pun: alpha-bet, as in “a bet on investment returns above a benchmark.” This implied that the so-called “Other Bets” in Google’s financial reports — subsidiaries that work on…

As Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state of the nation address this week, offering one social handout after another, praising heroic doctors and vaccine researchers and promising to toughen environmental regulation, it felt like a trip to a parallel reality. Yet…

The almost theatrical massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border in recent days, which some researchers have described as the heaviest since 2015, brings home to Western leaders an uncomfortable truth: If Russia had the appetite for a major military operation, Ukraine would be at its mercy. …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been known to apologize publicly from time to time, both for what she considers her own mistakes and for government decisions that she feels are justified but that can make voters unhappy. Wednesday’s Merkel apology was special, though, because it came with an…

When the Russian internet censor, Roskomnadzor, threatens to block Twitter within a month unless it removes certain kinds of content, it knows full well that it lacks the effective technological means to do so; technically speaking, not even China’s Great Firewall is good at blocking undesirable…

We’d rather have gone to the Philharmonie, but the government shut it down as part of its anti-Covid 19 policy. Closing down churches, however, turned out to be a step too far for the governing Christian Democrats. Chancellor Angela Merkel called on fellow legislators to listen to science in a…

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s methods of alleviating the economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic have concentrated most of its resulting pain in the bigger cities, which traditionally have seen the highest protest activity. You would think that hurting the places most likely to complain…