Quote:Last weekend a group of young activists turned out on a Moscow street to protest against western decadence. They were a hard-faced bunch, standing defiantly in military poses and wearing uniforms bearing the logo ‘Officers of Russia: Executive Youth Wing’ as they blocked access to an exhibition by American photographer Jock Sturges that featured images of nude adolescents. ‘We are here to protect people from paedo-philic influences,’ one Officer of Russia told journalists — while another protester sprayed the offending photographs with urine.

At the same time, Russia’s state–controlled airwaves filled with senators, priests and government officials denouncing the wickedness of the exhibition (which shut down immediately after the protests) and calling for the organisers to be prosecuted. The outcry came just days after the Russian government banned two popular porno-graphy sites, youporn and xhamster, also on the grounds of protecting public morality. Putin’s Russia is fast becoming a very puritan place.

Ever since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has pursued an increasingly religious-conservative ideology both at home and abroad, defining Russia as a moral fortress against sexual licence and decadence, porn and gay rights. Putin’s puritanism has grown hand-in-hand with the personal influence of two key conservative ideologues: his personal confessor Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov and the mystical geopolitical thinker Alexander Dugin.

Bishop Tikhon is one of Russia’s highest-profile critics of the decadence of the modern western world — and his Every-day Saints and the Other Stories was the best–selling Russian book of 2012, rivalled for sales only by Fifty Shades of Grey. Dugin is the chief ideologue of Eurasianism, an ideology which holds that Russia has a special historical destiny to save the world from the corrupt moral values of western capitalism.

The influence of the Russian Orthodox church on public life is growing fast, thanks to Kremlin patronage. The church’s preferred instrument of control is a draconian law criminalising ‘offending the feeling of religious believers’ that was passed in the wake of a protest by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in 2012. Prosecutions under the law have kicked into high gear this year.

In March in Stavropol, south Russia, criminal charges were brought against Viktor Krasnov after he wrote ‘God does not exist’ on the VKontakte social network, Russia’s version of Facebook. Krasnov was ordered to spend over a month undergoing examinations in a psychiatric ward before he was finally deemed sane enough to stand trial, and the case continues.

Polls show that most ordinary Russians hold deeply illiberal views on social issues (for example, 21 per cent want to see homosexuals ‘liquidated’, and another 37 per cent advocate ‘separating them from society’ — while only 11 per cent believe homosexuality to be a ‘sexual orientation from birth, which merits the same rights as heterosexual orientation’). And historical polling data from the recently shuttered Levada research centre shows that Russian attitudes on gays, blacks, Jews, foreigners, capital punishment and the like have remained pretty unenlightened since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But what is new is that those prejudices — especially the hatred of westerners and intolerance of nonconformity — are now being officially reinforced not just by state-controlled media but also by a growing cacophony of religious and ultranationalist media.

Quote:Russia resumed airstrikes in Syria on Tuesday in a major new effort to break resistance in rebel-held areas of Aleppo. "Today we started a large-scale operation to deliver massive fire on the positions of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra in the provinces of Idlib and Homs," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday. Shoigu did not mention strikes in Aleppo province, where the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that warplanes bombed a hospital in the town of Awejel.

The strikes came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with President-elect Donald Trump by telephone. Trump said during the presidential campaign that he wanted to focus on defeating ISIS rather than removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and he backed closer cooperation with Russia, which claims that it is leading the international fight against jihadi groups with its air campaign. Shoigu said on Tuesday that Putin and Trump discussed the war in Syria and the possibility of "uniting efforts in the fight with the common enemy number one—international terrorism and extremism."

Quote:The leader of the National Security Agency says there shouldn't be "any doubt in anybody's mind" that there was a conscious effort by a nation-state to sway the result of the 2016 presidential election. Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the NSA and US Cyber Command, made the comments in response to a question about Wikileaks' release of nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails during a conference presented by The Wall Street Journal.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds," Rogers said. "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect."

Rogers did not specify the nation-state or the specific effect, though US intelligence officials suspect Russia provided the emails to Wikileaks, after hackers stole them from inside DNC servers and the personal email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta. At least two different hacker groups associated with the Russian government were found inside the networks of the DNC over the past year, reading emails, chats, and downloading private documents. Many of those files were later released by Wikileaks..

The hack, which was investigated by the FBI and cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, was linked to Russia through a lengthy technical analysis, which was detailed on the firm's blog. Former NSA research scientist Dave Aitel, who now leads a cybersecurity firm, called the analysis "pretty dead on."

Quote:Imagine I had told you, in 2013, that this would happen — that Russia would successfully hack into a political party’s servers and use the revelations to try to change the course of an American presidential election. Imagine you didn’t know which party benefited, so there was no reason to downplay the event’s horror, or shrink from its implications. How much of a freakout would you have predicted across America? What sort of response would you have expected? How angry, specifically, would you have expected Republicans — a traditionally Russo-skeptic party — to be?

During the campaign, Trump startled national security experts in both parties by extravagantly praising Putin while glossing over his invasions of neighboring countries, his killings of opposition figures and journalists, and his support for the murderous regime of Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad. During the primary, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump about his apparent admiration for Putin, who "kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries." Trump replied, "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

Republicans once prided themselves on their rock-solid opposition to the Soviet Union and blasted Obama for trying to “reset” relations with Russia. That party now likes Putin more than it likes Obama, viewing a murderous foreign strongman (-10) more positively than it sees a twice-elected American president (-64).

Quote:But even though Trump the candidate asserted that Clinton's association-via-foundation with Vekselberg was a problem and a sign she was too cozy with Putin, Trump the president-elect has welcomed into his administration a businessman with a much tighter and more financially significant relationship with Vekselberg: Wilbur Ross, the billionaire investor who has specialized in distressed assets and who is now Trump's pick for commerce secretary.

For the past two years, Ross has been a business partner with Vekselberg in a major financial project involving the Bank of Cyprus, the country's largest and most significant financial institution. A financial crisis in 2013 led to the bank's collapse and eventual bailout.

The bank had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians—some of it presumably dirty money or funds deposited there to escape Russian taxation—and during its restructuring, a large amount of these deposits were converted into shares, giving Russian plutocrats a majority ownership (on paper) of the bank. The idea of Russians gaining control of a European bank unnerved European financial powers. But in the summer of 2014, Ross led a 1 billion euro takeover of the troubled bank in a deal that offered Russian shareholders a buyout.

Quote:The last time Donald Trump made an appearance in Moscow was November 2013 for the Miss Universe contest he famously owned. It was a glittering event filled with carefully choreographed photographs and parties.

Then another, more private, invitation arrived: Come to Nobu to meet more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank. Gref, who was President Vladimir Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, organized the meeting together with Aras Agalarov, the founder of Crocus Group, one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, which was hosting the beauty pageant at one of its concert halls.

“There was a good feeling from the meeting,” Gref said in an interview. “He’s a sensible person, very lively in his responses, with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia.”

Trump’s two-hour gathering at Nobu, a 15-minute walk from the Kremlin, suggests that the president-elect’s circle of contacts in Russia is wider than previously reported and includes a close confidant of Putin’s. 

Trump apparently hoped to meet Putin but didn’t. In June 2013, he tweetedabout the possibility Putin would attend the beauty pageant and become his new best friend.

Quote:Even though hackers responsible for the cyberattack on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign weren't caught in the act, it doesn't mean they can't be identified as President-elect Donald Trump has asserted. Michael Borohovski, a cybersecurity expert with experience working with the intelligence community and Chief Technology Officer of Tinfoil Security, says investigators have methods of uncovering the identity of attackers long after they're gone.

Quote:President-elect Donald Trump mocked US intelligence officials on Tuesday in a tweet claiming his briefing on Russian cyberattacks was delayed, and once again cast doubt on their claims that Russia interfered with the presidential election. "The 'Intelligence' briefing on so-called 'Russian hacking' was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!" Trump said on Twitter. However, a senior US intelligence official immediately refuted Trump’s claim, saying the briefing with the heads of the NSA, CIA, DNI and the FBI was "always" scheduled for Friday, NBC News reported.

Quote:President-elect Donald Trump continued to dispute US intelligence reports that Russia strategically hacked and leaked internal emails from top Democratic sources, citing recent statements from embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. On Wednesday, the president-elect blasted out a series of tweets quoting Assange's Tuesday interview with Fox News host and major supporter Sean Hannity in which the WikiLeaks founder parroted much of Trump's rhetoric criticizing media outlets. "Julian Assange said 'a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta' — why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!" Trump tweeted.

Quote:President-elect Donald Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday for his decision not to respond to sanctions levied by US President Barack Obama's administration this week in retaliation for suspected election-related hacking. "Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!" Trump tweeted.