Executive Summary: Ingushetia, a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, is being pacified and kept dependent on Moscow as intentional Kremlin policies, rather than policy failures or Ingush shortcomings, are causing high unemployment.   Moscow has often used Ingushetia to test out policies and if it concludes... MORE

Executive Summary: Two waves of recent purges in the People’s Liberation Army have focused on Xi Jinping’s two major bases of support, the Shaanxi Gang and the Fujian Clique, likely eroding his power over the military. A series of articles in the PLA Daily in... MORE

Executive Summary: The Kremlin’s decision to restrict and, in some cases, ban abortions by region rather than country-wide is leading to abortion tourism, in which women travel from one region where it is difficult to terminate pregnancies to another where it is accessible. Abortion tourism... MORE

Executive Summary:  The Kremlin faces a serious shortage of police officers amid rising, increasingly violent crimes that are predicted to only worsen with the return of veterans of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many Russians are taking things into their own hands as well as... MORE

Executive Summary: President Xi Jinping unveiled the “2025 Action Plan to Stabilize Foreign Investment” and met with leading entrepreneurs for the first time in seven years, in an effort to reinvigorate the private sector and court foreign investment. The plan seeks foreign investment in sectors... MORE

Executive Summary: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War to promote a distorted version of history in order to  stoke patriotism among the Chinese people. Official remembering of the war has changed over the... MORE

Executive Summary: Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the Russian courts part of his repressive machine, transforming them from being potentially the last line of defense of Russians’ constitutional rights into agencies to suppress those rights and keep Russians from protesting. Putin has done so... MORE

Executive Summary: The militarization of Russia’s education system demonstrates that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to continue an aggressive foreign policy and to ensure that Moscow will follow a similar approach even after he departs. Studies on the effect of Nazism in Germany indicate that... MORE

Executive Summary: Russia is planning extensive events for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II (WWII), using historical memory as a tool to legitimize its Ukraine invasion. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 2025 the “Year of the Defender of the Fatherland,” and... MORE

Executive Summary: Throughout his tenure, but especially since the start of his expanded war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has dramatically expanded the use of punitive psychiatry against his opponents and other dissenters, a practice that its victims have said made the Soviet Union,... MORE