Putin’s portrayal of Russia as the leader of an alliance of strong, traditional states against weak democracies has nevertheless won some adherents in America. White nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville demonstration that ended in violence in 2017 shouted, among other slogans, “Russia is our friend.” Russians participate in

For decades, American real estate agents were not required to examine the source of their clients’ funding the way that bankers and other businessmen do. It has long been possible, in the United States as in many European countries, to buy property anonymously, through shell companies. One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is

The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.

But although Russia was designed to look like a democracy, or at least enough like a democracy to fool foreign investors, there were no accidental victors in Russian elections, because there were no accidental candidates.

Mawarire had discovered something that many other autocratic governments have now learned: smear campaigns work. When a state apparatus combines the prosecution service, the courts, the police, state-controlled media, and social media in order to frame someone in a particular way—to tell a particular story about their life and their beliefs, to

But Yala News is not a news organization at all. As the BBC has reported, it’s an information laundromat, a site that exists to spread and propagate material produced by RT and other Russian facilities. Yala News has posted claims that the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha was staged, that Zelensky appeared drunk on television, and

RT reappeared and immediately began building offices and relationships across the continent, especially in countries run by autocrats who are eager to echo and imitate Russia’s anti-Western, anti-LGBT “traditional” messages and who appreciate its lack of critical or investigative reporting. Although the Algerian government has harassed reporters

Over time, the state itself began to act like a criminal syndicate, a parasite stripping resources off its host.

The public smear campaign was coupled with financial harassment, controls on his movement, and physical violence, though not murder: the point was to scare him and to intimidate his followers, not to make him disappear altogether. Freedom House has called these kinds of campaigns “civil death.” In Zimbabwe, as in so many other places, they are