Online Politics
The Moscow Mayor’s Office launched a large-scale city renovation plan that means tearing down thousands of apartment buildings and offering home owners new ones. City-wide discussions resulted in tens of thousands of people protesting, and the city leadership’s goal at this stage is to prevent opposition leaders from taking advantage of the protests. For that reason, the city leadership found itself supporting some protests in order to keep the overall process manageable.
Continued isolation from cooperating with most Western leaders and being locked with sensitive negotiations with China, Russia’s most powerful remaining partner, forced President Putin to reach out proactively to the new French leader. Despite multiple negative factors influencing the meeting, Putin had it organized within a couple of weeks to get a new negotiating partner from the West.
Alexei Navalny’s presidential campaign is attracting an increasing amount of public attention, and some his foundation’s anticorruption investigations can no longer be ignored. As one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen confronted him both online and in court, it became obvious that the ruling elite can find no way of ignoring him.
Russians are increasingly using the internet as their main source of news information while TV gradually declines, although it still leads by a wide margin. There was a noticeable switch from internet news media to social media, which coincided with the government’s effort to bring internet media under its control.
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