mark todd phd

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Patients feel comfortable speaking with me, because i am a very good listener and am sincerely concerned about their well being. I am patient and noncritical of others. At the first session, my goals are help the person to feel comfortable, feel free to express themselves, and gain a good understanding of their concerns. I teach patients skills that they can use to cope with the challenges they face. Ultimately I hope they will learn skills so that they can manage their difficulties independently. I have extensive experience working with children, adolescents, and families providing cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. I work with children who present with a wide variety of difficulties and am very knowledgeable in the use of behavior modification. I also treat adult with a wide variety of anxiety disorders such as OCD, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.

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• License State:  Maryland
• License No.:  2756

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Dr. Mark Todd, PHD

Works at atlantic psychological practice, a highly recommended counsellor in salisbury md.

106 Milford St Ste 104 Salisbury , MD 21804

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Dr. Mark Todd, PHD - Atlantic Psychological Practice is a highly recommended Counsellor in Salisbury MD with 5 recommendations from clients in the community

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Board of Directors

Vladimir Mekler was appointed as Non-Executive Director in February 2015 and became Chairman of the Board of Directors in June 2016.

Mr Mekler is the senior and managing partner of Mekler & Partners. Vladimir specializes in corporate law, including support and structuring complex and international transactions, development and optimization of corporate governance and legal systems in companies, legal support of M&A transactions, settlement of corporate disputes, as well as the organization and coordination of legal representation and defense in complex economic and property crimes.

Vladimir Mekler has been a member of the Moscow City Bar since 1980. From 2003 to 2010, he was also Vice Chairman of the Presidium of the Moscow City Bar Association. Vladimir graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Recognition of Independence_V.Mekler

Dr Mark Kurtser is the founder of MD Medical Group, CEO and member of the Board of Directors.

Dr Kurtser began his career at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, where he went from assistant to associate professor of the Department. From 1994 to 2012, he headed the Centre for Family Planning and Reproduction, the largest state hospital with focus on OBGNY in Moscow. From 2003 to 2013, Dr Kurtser was the Chief Obstetrician-gynecologist of the Moscow Healthcare Department.

Dr Kurtser continues to be actively involved in the activities of the Group as company CEO and practicing physician.

Vitaly Ustimenko was elected to the Board of Directors in February 2015.

From 2012 to 2016, Vitaly Ustimenko was the Chief Financial Officer of the Group. Vitaly has 20 years of experience in the field of finance and investment, including 8 years as a CFO. He worked in such companies as Inventure Partners fund, Solnechnye producty, Russian Helicopters and Deloitte. Vitaly is currently the CFO of Skillbox, an online education company in Russia.

Mr Ustimenko holds a bachelor’s degree from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation and a PhD in Finance from the State University of Management.

Recognition of Independence_V.Ustimenko

Extract from the minutes of the meeting of BoD

Tatiana Lukina was appointed as an independent non-executive director in December 2019, bringing to the Group 19 years of experience in finance, business restructuring and project management across a wide range of industries.

Tatiana's career began at KPMG, where she spent 10 years participating and leading projects in the areas of audit, capital market transactions (IPO, SPO, and Eurobonds), debt restructuring of the largest Russian companies, and M&A services in different countries. After that, Tatiana worked in the Portfolio Asset Management Department at ALFA Group, representing shareholders’ interests on boards and committees of ALFA bank (Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) and Rosvodokanal. In 2015–2016, Tatiana, as a co-leader of financial function, took part in the preparation for the IPO at OZON.ru, the leading online retailer in Russia. From 2016 to 2020, Ms Lukina worked as the CFO at GAME INSIGHT, a global developer of mobile games. From 2020–2022 Tatiana worked as the CFO of Dyninno, a group of companies providing products and services in the travel, finance, entertainment, and technology sectors in 50 countries. Since November 2022, Ms Lukina has been working as the CEO of a multi-Family office in the Middle East.

Ms Lukina graduated with honours from the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation with a degree in Finance, Business Valuation and Reorganisation Management and then obtained a PhD degree there. Since 2006, Tatiana has been a member of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (ACCA) in the UK, and successfully passed exams for obtaining the Russian Audit Licence.

Sergey Kalugin was appointed as an independent director in March 2022.

Mr. Kalugin has extensive experience in organizing the digital transformation of companies. From 2017 to 2018, he was Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, where he oversaw areas related to Smart City and Digital Health. From 2013 to 2017, he was President of PJSC Rostelecom, where he upgraded the infrastructure, improved the quality of customer service and adopted a new strategy that launched the company's digital transformation.

Sergey Kalugin graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in Economics.

Yury Kudimov was appointed as an independent non-executive director in September 2023, bringing to the Group 29 years of experience in economics, finance and investment.

In 1995-2003, Yury worked for the National Reserve Bank as the First Deputy Chairman of the Board, and since 2004, he headed the bank as President-Chairman of the Board. In 2009-2014, Yury Kudimov, as CEO of Investment Company of Vnesheconombank LLC, oversaw the creation of a new investment division of the bank – VEB Capital.

Currently, Yury holds the position of President of private equity investment and advisory group Pangeo Capital, an investment advisor to capital providers with a flexible investment mandate, wide geographical scope and primarily focusing on Russia, Europe and Americas.

Mr. Kudimov graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Yury received a master's degree in Banking and International financial systems from Dowling College in New York.

The Board of Directors includes the Audit Committee, the Remuneration Committee and the Nomination Committee. These committees are intended for preliminary consideration of the most important issues and preparation of recommendations for the Board of Directors to take decisions on such issues.

Audit Committee

• Tatiana Lukina, independent Member of the Board of Directors - Chairman of the Audit Committee
• Sergey Kalugin, independent Member of the Board of Directors
• Vitaly Ustimenko, independent Member of the Board of Directors

Remuneration Committee

• Sergey Kalugin, independent Member of the Board of Directors - Chairman of the Remuneration Committee
• Tatiana Lukina, independent Member of the Board of Directors
• Vladimir Mekler, independent Member of the Board of Directors

Nomination Committee

• Vladimir Mekler, independent Member of the Board of Directors - Chairman of the Nomination Committee
• Yury Kudimov, independent Member of the Board of Directors

Why Didn't Trump Build Anything in Russia?

The art of the deal runs into the reality of “a really scary place.”

Updated on September 25, 2017.

Thirty years ago, in July 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump flew to the Soviet Union, apparently at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, in order to scout locations for a Trump hotel in Moscow. “It was an extraordinary experience,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal . “We toured half a dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” He came away “impressed with the ambition of the Soviet officials to make a deal.”

And yet a deal was never struck, neither then nor in 1996, when the Moscow real-estate market really cranked up and Trump tried to bid on a renovation of Hotel Rossiya near the Kremlin. Nor did anything come to fruition in 2008 when Trump announced plans to build in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi; nor in 2013, when he visited Moscow and said he was going to build a Trump Tower there with the help of Russian mega-developer Aras Agalarov. In June 2015, shortly before declaring his presidential candidacy, Trump bragged to Bill O’Reilly that, “I was over in Moscow two years ago and I will tell you—you can get along with those people and get along with them well. You can make deals with those people. Obama can’t.” At the time, it has since been reported , Trump’s surrogates Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were actively pursuing another real-estate development on Trump’s behalf in Moscow, but, by winter of 2016, that project was moot, too.

The American president has often bragged about his ability to cut deals and about how well he gets along with the Russians . The press and investigators have speculated about the extent of his connections to the Russian business and political elite. And yet, Trump never actually built anything in Moscow. When the president said, shortly after his inauguration, “I don’t have any deals in Russia,” he wasn’t wrong.

The question is why. When just about every other major hotel chain in the world was able to build in Moscow and beyond, why didn’t Trump close a deal in Russia?

The absence of Trump real estate in Russia, it turns out, is a revealing reflection of the disconnect between the image Trump projects and the reputation he and his surrogates have established in Russia.

In part it was because, as Donald Trump Jr. once said himself, Russia “really is a scary place.” In a 2008 interview with a small trade publication, Trump Jr. said that he had taken “half a dozen trips to Russia in the last 18 months” and that “several buyers have been attracted to our projects there.” But there was something getting in the way of those trips adding up to a Trump Tower Moscow. “It is definitely not an issue of being able to find a deal,” Trump Jr. said, “but an issue of ‘Will I ever see my money back out of that deal or can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with?’ As much as we want to take our business over there, Russia is just a different world. … It is a question of who knows who, whose brother is paying off who, etc.”

Trump Jr., who did not respond to request for comment, was right: The world of Russian business is a dark and treacherous place, and Moscow real estate is one of its darkest corners. “Moscow is like New York in many ways, just way more corrupt,” says a Western real-estate developer in Russia, who asked for anonymity in order not to jeopardize local partners and ongoing business deals. “To pull a building out of the ground, you need so many permits, so many authorizations—the mind reels. And all of it is so corrupt, it’s insane.” To navigate all this, the Trump Organization would have needed a local partner that was not just a capable developer, but had the right political connections to secure all the necessary permissions. “You need a good Russian partner, otherwise there’s no way,” says Mark Stiles, an American businessman who had extensive real-estate holdings in Russia.

In 2013, Trump worked with Agalarov , who had stellar connections at the very zenith of Russian political and business life. But that deal went sour after it caused a scandal in Kyrgyzstan— long story —and after the Russian economy took a nosedive in 2014.

But at other times, Trump’s man on the ground was Felix Sater, a Russian-born wheeler and dealer from the Russian-immigrant enclaves of Brooklyn. Sater, who declined to comment on the record for this story, once served a year in an American prison on an assault conviction after he stabbed a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass. Not long after he got out of jail in the mid-90s, he was charged with securities fraud. Sater struck a deal to avoid prison time by becoming an FBI informant—a role that included providing the U.S. government with Soviet-era weapons purchased from an arms dealer.

In 2002, Sater, who was renting office space in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, worked his way into Trump's inner circle. In 2004, Sater started traveling to Moscow and tried to put together Russian real-estate deals for Trump. One potential deal, a Trump building on the territory of Moscow’s Soviet-era Sacco and Vanzetti Pencil Factory, fell through when the Russian partner was unable to get the right permits.

In late 2007, in addition to his work for Trump, Sater also began serving as an adviser to the real-estate developer Sergei Polonsky, a flamboyant builder who has called himself Russia’s Donald Trump. (“And yet he’s gone bankrupt twice,” Polonsky said of Trump, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti , “and I haven’t, ever.”) Polonsky, who named his son after his development company, Mirax, was behind some of Moscow’s hottest developments. Sater was tasked with helping Polonsky develop international projects, but only one ever came to fruition.

This didn’t exactly surprise Polonsky’s lieutenants. Alexey Kunitsin, who at the time was chairman of the board at Mirax, told me that Polonsky had been warned about Sater and his past, but Polonsky didn’t care. “I would never hire somebody like that,” Kunitsin said. “You can’t trust him in any way, not in a professional setting, not in a personal setting. You could see it very clearly. He was telling constant crazy stories, wild fantasies about all the people he knew. He was not a balanced dude. He’s very emotional and gets into conflicts very easily.” Kunitsin recalled that Sater would also brag to his coworkers at Mirax about how good he was at spending all the money he allegedly earned. “It didn’t really inspire confidence, especially when he described it all so colorfully,” Kunitsin said. Another former Mirax employee who dealt with Sater paints a similar portrait. “He’s not a serious person,” the former Mirax employee said. “He’s not a total bullshitter, he can do some things, but he’s also a bullshitter. He tries to create the impression of someone who is extremely well-connected and very busy.”

That Sater raised suspicions and turned Moscow businessmen off with tales of conspicuous consumption, in a city where it is practically a sport, is deeply telling. “You really have to be very talented to do that,” said a prominent Russian real-estate consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he worried that speaking to a journalist would jeopardize his professional relationships in Moscow. “And most people didn’t take him seriously. He was ready to pay for a few bottles of Cristal in the club, but was not someone you want to make a serious deal with.”

Polonsky was hard hit by the 2008 financial crisis, which also killed off Trump’s plans for building Trump buildings in Russia. But this didn’t derail Sater, who ditched Polonsky and, in 2010, became a senior adviser to Donald Trump, according to his business cards and email signature. That year, he was working on Trump’s development plans in Russia, again. And he ran into trouble, again. Sater told people in Moscow he had a signed authorization from Trump to enter into negotiations on his behalf, but because of Sater’s flamboyant manner, few people believed the document was authentic. “He was walking around with a power of attorney or something from Trump,” the Russian real-estate consultant said of Sater. “It was a very suspicious-looking document.”

Sater’s reputation continued to haunt him, even in Russia. “In 2010 when you Googled him you got a story form The New York Times about his past and it made things difficult for him,” says the former Mirax employee, referring to a 2007 article by Charles Bagli . The piece was the first to dredge up Sater’s checkered history and to put it in one, reputable place. Sater tried spelling his name “Satter” but it didn’t help.

A boutique Moscow PR agency offered to help rehabilitate his image. “Nice people [in Moscow] didn’t want to do business with him,” says a representative of the now-defunct agency. His assessment of Sater’s dilemma, which he shared with me on condition of anonymity, was stark. “Your mass media image today is the classical negative image of businessperson who is likely to be connected a criminal,” the PR agency wrote to Sater in September 2010. “Your media image is created by a third party, not you. You [sic] story is covered by media sources in a negative fashion. As a result, it affects even neutral news on your persona.” (Sater did not end up hiring them.)

It also didn’t help that Sater was a freelancer, and an outsider. He may have been born in Moscow, but he had left as a child. Despite a stint in Moscow in the 1990s , his return visits were brief and sporadic, his Russian accented by his long life in America. He would have read to Russians as an American, a foreigner. He had no obvious krysha , or “roof”—political protection as insurance against things going sideways. “The first question when you’re doing business in Russia is: who’s your krysha ?” says one longtime Western investor in Moscow, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivities of doing business in such a treacherous environment. “No krysha , no deal.” Polonsky had provided one such krysha , but by the time Sater tried in 2015 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow City, the capital’s modernist financial district, Polonsky was in prison and on trial for embezzlement. (He has since been released.) Trump, whom Sater claimed to be representing, was not a good krysha either: He was a foreigner, lived in New York, and had no pull within the various power structures in Russia. (The White House referred queries about this story to the Trump Organization. In response to repeated inquiries, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization underscored that it “has never had any real estate holdings or interests in Russia,” but declined to address questions about the president’s previous business relationship with Sater.)

In the fall of 2015, months after Trump declared his presidential candidacy, Sater was at it again, according to reports in The Washington Post and New York Times . In emails obtained by the Times , he bragged to Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and unofficial campaign surrogate, that he had lined up financing for a Trump Tower in Moscow City from VTB, a bank under U.S. sanctions. (VTB denies that any such negotiations ever took place, saying through a spokesperson that “that not a single VTB group subsidiary had any dealings with Mr.Trump, his representatives or any companies affiliated with him.”) He also bragged that “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” That year, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent, and Cohen told the Times that he spoke with Trump three times about the deal.

Again, the deal went nowhere. According to the Times , for all his blustery promises of getting Putin involved, Sater did not even have the connections to get the proper permits to get the project going.

But there were two other factors. One was the sad state of the Russian economy. 2014 had brought the twin shocks of plummeting oil prices and Western sanctions, and the ruble collapsed. The sanctions cut off access to cheap financing, including to banks like VTB, known as the wallet of the FSB , one of Russia’s intelligence services. Real-estate development ground to a halt; vacancies rose. It was a punishing, prohibitive environment in which to build a new luxury high-rise.

The other factor was that Sater’s Russian partner, Andrei Rozov , did not have the economic heft or the political connections to overcome these obstacles. Sater knew Rozov when they worked together at Mirax, but he was the wrong partner for a Trump Tower Moscow. Rozov mostly developed residential projects in a sleepy, shabby bedroom community far from Moscow’s center. It is not, in other words, the kind of prime real estate where one would build a ritzy hotel. Moreover, by 2015, Rozov was trying to rescue his money and invest it in the United States, in the shale boom towns of the Dakotas. According to two sources who know Rozov, he was scheduled to attend Trump’s inauguration but didn’t make it. Rozov declined to comment for this article.

With the project hopelessly stalled, Cohen tried to nudge it forward in January 2016 by calling in the big Russian political guns Sater had bragged about. But Cohen seriously misfired, and instead emailed Putin’s mustachioed, bon vivant spokesman Dmitry Peskov for help with the Trump Tower project. Moreover, Cohen told me, he sent the email to the general inbox for press inquiries listed on the Kremlin website. Peskov confirmed to the Russian press that his office had received the email and chose to ignore it. “As far as we don’t respond to business topics, this is not our job, we did not send a response,” Peskov said.

Some Western observers saw this as evidence of high-level contact between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin, but to veterans of the world of Moscow real estate, it was nothing but a rookie mistake. They see the story as emblematic of why Trump could never build anything in Moscow, despite three decades of talk. “That is like the stupidest, most absurd thing ever,” says the Western real-estate developer of Cohen’s email. Nor were they surprised that the Trump team committed this error, given who was on the team. “The Russians that he associates with, I would never do business with,” says the Western real-estate developer of Trump and his business partners from the former Soviet Union, like Sater. “I’ve been involved with Russia for 25 years. ... A genuine developer could’ve done a lot with that brand.”

Yet the brand, for all its potential appeal to Moscow’s gaudy nouveau riches, didn’t have much cachet in Russia. It was not well-known enough for Moscow developers to pay a premium to license the name. “The Trump brand, which in America is very strong, in Russia it doesn’t have that kind of pull,” the former Mirax employee said. “Russians won’t agree to pay 30 percent more for elite real estate” just because it was branded “Trump,” because “no one in Russia watched The Apprentice .” The Russian real-estate consultant voiced a similar sentiment. “In Russia, Trump’s name was never that interesting or notable so that someone would be willing to invest and license it,” he said. “Everything that was built in Russia appreciated well without Trump’s name, so there was no need to pay for his name. There was no business sense in licensing his name.”

Hotel brands like the Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons are paid not just for their names but to actually run the hotel built by a developer. All Trump offered was his name, and at a hefty mark-up at that. The Russians were skeptical, especially given that Trump was not investing anything in any of these projects. “Trump didn’t invest anything,” says Kunitsin, the former Mirax board chair, “and in my opinion, the brand is a little too expensive.”

“Trump wants a fee for branding and doesn't put money in, so most developers’ in Moscow responses are ‘so what the fuck do we need him for?’” says one person familiar with the various licensing talks. This was especially the case with Polonsky, who felt that his name was worth more in Moscow than Trump’s. Says the source familiar with the talks, “Developers were all looking for people to bring money there, and Donald doesn’t write checks, he takes checks. They said, ‘Why should we pay Donald Trump 10 or 15 percent, plus you had to write a check for a million up front to show you were serious, when we could pay three percent to Hyatt or four percent to Ritz Carlton? What’s the big deal about Trump?’” (The catch, of course, is that Trump’s brand is far more recognizable in Russia now that he is president, but given the suspicions about Trump’s ties to Russia, any potential deal would also attract negative attention.)

And for all Trump’s talk of being able to negotiate with the Russians in a way that Obama couldn’t, Trump’s people inspired no respect at Moscow’s real-estate negotiating table. “Trump wants everything and he’s dealing with the Russians, who aren’t stupid,” says the Western investor in Russian real estate. “If you want everything from the Russians, they’re not going to give it to you. Trump’s way of negotiating is to ask for every fucking thing. The Russians have a different philosophy of negotiation: He who asks is the weak party.”

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The pro-democracy protests rocking Moscow, explained

In July, Moscow election officials banned opposition candidates from running for city council. This weekend, protests swelled to 50,000 in Moscow.

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Tens of thousands of people protested in Moscow on Saturday, marking the fifth weekend people have rallied in the Russian city to demand fair elections.

The demonstrations began in July after election officials barred opposition candidates from running for the Moscow city council, disqualifying their ballots because of what officials claimed were irregularities in the 5,000 signatures each had to gather to run.

That decision — to block the opposition from participating — turned a sleepy municipal election into a political controversy that intensified amid police crackdowns against demonstrators and opposition figures.

Saturday’s rally in Moscow was the largest yet, and one of the biggest political protests in Russia in years. Estimates put the crowds at about 50,000 , although authorities suggested the official number was closer to 20,000. The rally was sanctioned — meaning people had a permit to protest — although police reportedly arrested about 200 people . Russians in other cities, including St. Petersburg, also joined in on the demonstrations, a sign that the unrest and dissatisfaction may extend beyond Moscow.

Moscow’s municipal elections are very much the focus of these protests, but it’s hard to divorce it completely from larger political and economic issues within Russia, specifically President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime.

“As with many other protests and uprisings all around the region, they’re much more fluid when it comes to reason, but they’re still emblematic of what is happening with the general dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, in this particular case, the policies of Putin’s administration at the moment,” Maksym Eristavi, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Prague, told me.

The Moscow city council elections are expected to move ahead on September 8, and it seems extraordinarily unlikely that authorities will give in to protesters’ demands and let the opposition stand for the vote. But if the protests continue or continue to spread, the uproar over the municipal elections may be just the beginning.

Opposition leaders followed the onerous rules to get on Moscow’s city council ballot. Election officials still denied them the chance to run.

All 45 seats in the Moscow city council are up for reelection on September 8. The legislative body is controlled by the pro-Kremlin ruling United Russia party. But the party is pretty unpopular right now, so the Moscow United Russia candidates came up with an ingenious plan to run as independents in the city council instead.

A bunch of people actually wanted to run as legit independents — opposition candidates. To do so, they had to meet some pretty onerous requirements, specifically garnering 5,000 signatures each from voters.

But officials on Moscow’s electoral commission invalidated many of the signatures for these opposition candidates, claiming they were faked or had incorrect details; some opposition leaders accused election officials of altering the signatures themselves.

About 30 opposition candidates were initially disqualified from running, and many just happened to be outspoken critics of the Kremlin. In another funny coincidence, none of those United Russia-candidates-turned-independents were disqualified, although critics claimed they didn’t even bother to actually collect signatures or that their applications were barely verified by election officials.

On July 14, about 2,000 protesters — including opposition candidates — rallied outside Moscow’s election headquarters to protest the disqualification of the candidates and to demand a meeting with Moscow’s election commissioner . Dozens were arrested, including some opposition candidates.

The protests continued. On July 20, more than 20,000 protesters met in Moscow to demand the opposition candidates be included on the ballots.

Opposition leader and anti-corruption advocate Alexei Navalny — a major Putin critic who was blocked from running against him for the presidency in 2018 — had called for another protest on July 27 and was promptly arrested on July 24 and sentenced to 30 days in jail for organizing an unauthorized protest. While in prison, he was hospitalized with a severe allergic reaction, with some allies worrying that he might have been poisoned.

Other opposition candidates have since been arrested, including Dmitri Gudkov, who once served as an opposition voice in the state duma (legislature) and has now been sentenced to 30 days in jail for organizing an unauthorized election protest ; and Ilya Yashin, a prominent opposition figure arrested for organizing an unauthorized protest after the July 14 rally. Yashin is also calling for Moscow to cancel the September 8 elections.

But the demonstration still went ahead on July 27, where Russian police arrested nearly 1,300 people and reportedly beat back protesters with batons.

A fourth round of protests took place on August 3, with several hundred detained. And on August 10, 50,000 people gathered, including some high-profile Russian celebrities, even though many of the opposition leaders are now jailed. Lyubov Sobol, an opposition candidate who is now on a hunger strike in protest of her exclusion from the Moscow ballot, posted a video on Twitter that appeared to show police barging into her apartment ahead of the protest.

The protest on August 10 — like that on July 20, where 20,000 participated — was sanctioned, meaning protesters had a permit. Brian Taylor, a professor in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, told me that might have made it more likely for people to come out and protest, as the risk of arrest is a bit lower than during those unauthorized protests.

“Even so,” Taylor said, “we do seem to be seeing a ramping up in tension around this rather than a successful repression of protest on the part of authorities so far.”

Eristavi, the senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me it’s important to keep in mind that people were still detained, but that authorities were careful to avoid arresting people in large numbers, and largely did so away from the cameras.

He described this as part of the Kremlin’s “larger disinformation narrative” to sow confusion. “You’re not acting out as completely authoritarian places like North Korea, or some places that just don’t care about the optics — you have to preserve some kind of a confusion,” Eristavi said. “If I’m abroad, or even I’m somewhere else in Russia, and I’m seeing this, I don’t know what to make of it; it could be worse.”

But beneath the optics, there’s corruption and a skewed justice system and media and internet restrictions. And these bigger issues are what the Moscow protestors may be demonstrating about going forward.

“It started off fairly small, but it’s obviously now mushroomed into something more than just can they stand for election to the municipal council,” Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest , told me. “But it’s a much broader issue of people’s rights, people’s right to vote, to choose who represents them.”

The protests are a powerful statement — but it’s hard to predict what comes next

What prompted the protests in Moscow is very much authoritarianism 101: the government using all the tools available to sideline and stamp out the opposition.

“Wherever the opposition goes right now, they’re meeting what we might consider soft repression, manipulation,” Taylor said. At first, election officials tried to ban the Moscow candidates from the local elections; when that didn’t work, authorities started arresting those opposition leaders and protesters.

The question is why they would go to such lengths. It would seem that letting a few opposition candidates into the Moscow city council to debate budgets and discuss trash pickup might not be much of a threat to Putin’s regime. Voter turnout tends to be pretty low for local elections, anyway.

But that’s not how the Kremlin is looking at it — or dealing with it.

“In the past, you might have expected, even this time, the Kremlin to say, ‘okay fine, a couple of people can run,’ and then just figure out a way to manipulate the ballot so that they don’t actually win, even if they do win — or if they win, then figure out some excuse to have them removed,” Evelyn Farkas, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 2012 to 2015, told me.

But instead, Moscow basically dug in. And the opposition, this time, responded in kind. “‘The Kremlin is digging in its heels, so let’s test it,’” Farkas said.

Moscow, of course, is a major city, with more than 12 million residents, so Putin’s regime is going to be particularly attuned to what’s going on in the city. And Putin may have particular reasons to be a little sensitive these days.

Putin and the ruling United Russia party have been slipping in popularity as more Russians become disillusioned with the state of the Russian economy, including rising inequality and falling incomes. Declining oil prices and sanctions have squeezed the Kremlin, and the government had to push through unpopular measures last year, including increasing the retirement age.

Though Russian media is tightly controlled, citizens are also starting to express frustration about Russian government corruption and mismanagement and the country’s increasing isolation in the world. And many, especially younger generations, have basically known no other leader but Putin. They’re beginning to wonder about Russia’s political future when Putin’s term is up in 2024 . Many are unsure about what will happen after —or if there will actually be an after.

“I think a lot of this is about the future of the country, and are these young people now, if you’re 30-years-old, are you going to continue to have to live under a system like this, where you really don’t have a lot of political choices and where the economy isn’t doing so well?” Stent said.

Stent and others pointed out that the protests are being led by young people, similar to the protests that have rocked Hong Kong for weeks . And while there are definitely visible opposition figures, they’re both largely leaderless and rely on grassroots organizing — making them more fluid and spontaneous, and maybe just a bit harder for authorities to squash fully.

Putin, meanwhile, has accused Western democracies, specifically the United States , of meddling and fomenting the unrest — a talking point that he’s famously used before .

Putin’s problems are likely closer to home, although it’s far too early to say what these protests will accomplish — and what it means for Russia. Experts pointed out that this weekend saw other cities join in protests, including St. Petersburg, where about 80 or so people were detained . If that continues, that’s a sign that discontent might be more widespread.

But few thought Moscow’s protests were a legitimate threat to Putin’s regime, at least in their current form. The government has been able to keep the opposition off the ballot and to largely deal with the protests through arrests. And Putin has faced politics protests in the past, notably in 2011, 2012, and 2013 over the electoral system, all of which faded without much changing.

“We shouldn’t assume the days of the Putin regime are numbered,” Stent said. “We’re not there yet.”

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