This article examines the use of Telegram as a means of political communication by the ruling political elite in Russia (both external, i.e., communication with the society and other political forces, and internal, i.e., between different, often rival, groups within the elite itself). While Telegram is illegal at the official level, and attempts have been made to block it in Russia since April 2018, unofficially the Russian authorities continue to actively use Telegram channels for political communication and influencing public opinion as well as for monitoring the mood of the public. What is the reason for this ambivalent attitude toward Telegram? What makes it so attractive for the Russian establishment? How are the authorities using Telegram for their own purposes? Answering these questions is the main goal of this study.

The present paper is dedicated to the phenomenon of the public sphere which is currently undergoing significant transformations under the influence of the Internet and social media. The main goal of the article is to find a new approach to the modern development of the public sphere by rethinking it from an Arendtian perspective. The first part examines the main actual changes taking place in the public sphere under the influence of social media, and concludes that the classical concept of the public sphere, dating back to its early notion of Jürgen Habermas, needs to be rethought, this requiring a new approach which would take into account the actual changes and new circumstances in the development of the public sphere. It is proposed to use Arendt's understanding of the public sphere as one of the sources of this new approach which remains relevant today in many ways. The second part examines Arendt's notion of the public sphere as compared with the concept of the public sphere of early Habermasian writing. As a result of this consideration, it is concluded that, in a number of points, Arendt's notion of the public sphere is better suited to an understanding of the modern public sphere than the classical Habermasian concept. In the third part, I rethink the existing trends in the development of the digital public sphere from Arendt's standpoint.

This paper considers the issue of the influence of social media on politics in Russia. Having emerged in the late 1990s as a tool for informal communication, social media became an important part of Russian socio-political life by the end of 2010s. The past two decades is a sufficient period of time to draw some intermediate conclusions of the impact of social media on the political development of the country. To do this is the main goal of the paper. Its main body consists of three parts. The first chapter gives a general characterization of Russian social media, its significance in terms of influencing the formation of public opinion, public debate, and the socio-political agenda in the country. The second chapter examines the use of social media by the Russian opposition and protest movements. The third chapter analyses the use of social media by the Russian authorities.

The question of how the digital transformation of the public sphere affects political processes has been of interest to researchers since the spread of the Internet in the early 1990s. However, today there is no clear or unambiguous answer to this question; expert estimates differ radically, from extremely positive to extremely negative. This article attempts to take a comprehensive approach to this issue, conceptualizing the transformations taking place in the public sphere under the influence of Internet communication technologies, taking their political context into account, and identifying the relationship between these changes and possible transformations of political regimes. In order to achieve these goals, several tasks are tackled during this research. The first section examines the issue as to whether the concept of the public sphere can be used in a non-democratic context. It also delineates two main types of the public sphere, the "democratic public sphere" and the "authoritarian public sphere, " in order to take into account the features of public discourse in the context of various political regimes. The second section discusses the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a democratic context. The third section considers the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a non-democratic context. The concluding section summarizes the results of the study, states the existing gaps and difficulties, outlines the ways for their possible extension, and raises questions requiring attention from other researchers.

This article analyses the Baltic policy of united Germany from the 1990s until today. The authors set out to identify the significance of German-Baltic relations and the role of the Eastern policy in Russian-German relations. The method of dynamic comparison between the political and economic narrative in intergovernmental relations makes it possible to identify distinctive features of Germany's Baltic policy in the context of current international relations. In particular, it is noted that Germany was most active in the Baltic region in the 1990s, when the country was establishing political, economic, and cultural ties with the new independent states. In the second half of the 1990s, Germany's foreign policy became less intense. After the accession of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to the EU and NATO in 2004, certain disagreements started to arise between Germany and the Baltics. It explains the lukewarm relations between them. The Ukraine events brought about a change in Germany's regional policy. Despite Russia remaining one of the key economic and political counteractors, Germany, being a partner of the Baltics in the EU and NATO, cannot adopt a neutral position in the conflict of interests between the Baltics and Russia