It's quite something to see EU bankers begin to say the same sorts of things about Visa and Mastercard and payment processing that Russian bankers were saying from about 2010 onwards www.ft.com/content/fcc2...

Last week in Moscow - Indian restaurants, the Turkish and Russian languages and their approach to ethnicity, Cubans clearing snow in Krasnogorsk kotelnaya.substack.com/p/kotelnaya-...

My monthly trip to Falanster to pick up Russian journals followed by a walk to Clovelly, a pub in Moscow made up completely of antique furniture from a village in Cornwall

The first Kotelnaya Weekly, a collection of things from around Moscow and the internet that I found interesting in the last 7 days. This week: masala, a beerhall, Adam Tooze's Chinese 1989 and ethnicity in the Turkish and Russian languages kotelnaya.substack.com/p/kotelnaya-...

I have no idea what the word "Exclusive" means in journalism anymore. In what way are these articles on the FT exclusives? They're summaries of emails the whole world has access to. What is exclusive about reading publicly-available emails and writing a story about them?

It might sound strange, at minus 13, but there's a hint of spring in Moscow today. The sun is shining, so much so that I've had to open the windows in my flat because it's too warm, birds are chirping and the ice is melting. We're creeping steadily towards zero from next week.

Wow, Industry season 4 is terrible, just designed to shock. It's popularity, and the more money HBO spend on it and its promotion, is inverse to quality. The first season was great, but nobody watched it so HBO made sure the second season was previewed everywhere and it became a hit.

Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead, but everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed — Elvis Costello in 1980 perfectly describing Moscow in 2026

The last few years have been extremely instructive about the publishing industry in the UK and US. 1) Make bold overarching claim (about Russia in most cases) 2) Use popular semi-academic buzzwords 3) Ensure a complex explanation of something quite simple 4) Pander to reader bias

Burger King’s operations in Russia have been totally unaffected by sanctions, so much so that they now have a range of frozen Burger King products in Russian supermarkets

After a few days of near-constant snowfall, it’s minus 20 and blue skies in Moscow today. Municipal workers are on roofs, shovelling snow onto the ground. If you’re sat by the window, watching huge chunks of snow fall in front of you, it feels a bit like a drive-in car wash.

I like Orhan Pamuk’s work, especially Snow, but The Museum of Innocence is absolutely unbearable. I see what the middle section, with 200 pages of endless repetition and 8 years of visits to the same house, tries to do but it’s just endless grind, labouring the same point.

When I saw that video doing the rounds, I presumed it was just some classic American rage bait. But it seems it was serious and the New York Times has now published a piece explaining to the weirdest nation on earth why the rest of us... open our windows. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/r...

There have always been Indian restaurants in Moscow, many of them quite bad. The one exception was always Jai Hind, off Prospekt Mira. It’s still the best, by far, but the quality of Indian restaurants and the preponderance of Indian chefs and waiters has skyrocketed recently.

Snow has been coming down in Moscow for about 48 hours now

A 109-year-old Soviet war veteran -- who was born in 1917, sailed on the Yermak icebreaker, fought in the defence of Leningrad, worked as a doctor post-war and moved to Toronto in 2002 -- has died. What a life. www.fontanka.ru/2026/01/26/7...

A new bar has just opened up near me, about a 3 minute walk away across the dvor. That's the good news. The bad news is they serve beer in 400ml pilsner glasses, despite not serving any pilsner.

My next post, next week, is going to be about how the late Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, known now to everyone as Zhirik, has reached much more people as an Insta/TikTok meme than he did in life. His memeificiation was complete with a few left friends quoting clips of him in the pub

Russian coal exports are back up, after three years of decline. The main difference, from the previous three years, seems to be that South Korea has begun to import coal from Russia in large quantities www.vedomosti.ru/business/art...

This week's piece about my favourite lunch spot closing down after 8 years and the enshitification of Moscow's Patriarch's Ponds neighbourhood kotelnaya.substack.com/p/the-slow-d...

In 2025, 17 restaurants, bars and coffee shops in Moscow's Patriarch's Ponds closed. It used to be the place to be seen. What does it's slow decline tell us about Moscow in 2026? kotelnaya.substack.com/p/the-slow-d...

A new post: The Slow Death of Patriarch's Ponds, or how influencers enshitified a neighbourhood open.substack.com/pub/kotelnay...

A new development from the middle of December, for me at least, is that WhatsApp no longer works in Russia without a VPN. A minor inconvenience, as I always have a VPN on anyway, but it seems people are being heavily nudged towards MAX.

So the US imposes economic sanctions on other countries when they annex part of or invade a sovereign state but is also set to impose economic sanctions (tariffs) on it's supposed allies because those allies don't support the US annexing part of a sovereign state. Western values at work.

Nizhny Novgorod https://www.wikiart.org/en/aristarkh-lentulov/nizhny-novgorod-1925

Moscow, after the deluge

Coming from the UK, where there has been snowfall overnight and the country is at a standstill, I’m always surprised by how a severe snowstorm is shrugged off in Moscow. The bin men are still out.

I've been reading Owen Hatherley for close to two decades now. There's no other British author quite like him. His most recent NLR piece is fantastic. newleftreview.org/issues/ii155...

Lovely thick snowflakes lazily falling out of the sky in Moscow today.

I've seen lots of "this is what we will do if the US seizes Greenland" from EU politicians but (and I may have missed something) I haven't seen anyone calling for sanctions? In 2022 we were told sanctions were a natural and inevitable consequence of invasion and/or annexation

My main impression from being back in my small north west of England hometown over Christmas and New Year is just how many people, of all ages, seem to be taking ozempic or similar drugs. It's everywhere.

One of my favourite pre-revolutionary buildings in Moscow, the Loan Treasury Building, which was completed in 1916 and now houses the Russian Central Bank vaults.

It’s been very noticeable —watching both events in horror on snowy mornings in Moscow four years apart — the difference between Sky News and the BBC’s absolute moral clarity on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and their absolute moral cowardice today.

Trump has basically done to Maduro what Putin dreamed of doing to Zelenskiy in February 2022

I wonder if kidnapping another country's president is something that would get one sanctioned? Surely Kaja Kallas and the EU will be offering their immediate condemnation?

I'm not really sure how outlets are still writing this story as news in 2026. It has always been the case. Nothing ever changed. You can get almost anything in Moscow now that you could get prior to February 2022. www.ft.com/content/65a1...

Probably the only person in the North West of England bringing in the New Year by watching the Detroit Red Wings against the Winnipeg Jets. Happy New Year/ с новым годом!

Every generation seems to discover, or rediscover, the Decembrists and every generation seems to project their own meaning onto them. www.economist.com/christmas-sp...

Just one more day until we enter the Morrissey time of the year: every day is like Sunday

It’s the Kotelnaya christmas pint per present tour. The rules are you have a pint in a different pub every time you buy a present. If you buy more than one present in the same place you can have more than one pint in the same pub.

Here we have what can only be described as Manchester’s Luzhkovshchina

Do any journalists know what "trendy" means? Myata Lounge is an extremely tacky chain of shisha bars that nobody who follows any sort of trend would ever want to be seen in -- from the NYT story on the Assads in Moscow. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/w...

Notes from the pre-holiday round of Zooms and Yandex Telemost meetings. All of my UK/US/European clients want a quick call, a 15 minute update that is mainly pleasantries about Christmas and New Year. The former USSR clients want a 2-hour in depth discussion about every aspect of the work.

I first saw an influx of Chinese cars in Moscow over the last three years. Then, in the last 12 months, I began to see them around Dubai. Now, they're all over the UK. Even my parents' neighbours in our small town in the North West drive Chinese cars www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/b...

A grey but not very wintry Hyde Park this morning

More UK train fun. I booked from Manchester to London tomorrow about 25 minutes ago. 10 minutes ago, I got an email saying the train is cancelled because of a shortage of staff.

Big Tim with some extremely "5am at the afters" discourse.

In what to me is an early Christmas present, the New Yorker has finally uploaded its full archive in a format that can be read on the site like any other New Yorker article. No more having to download pdfs of the original print layout. www.newyorker.com/issue-explorer

Always faintly amused by the amount of people jogging or cycling in London in the morning darkness. It's something you pretty much never see in Moscow, where gym memberships are much more affordable and gyms are in every neighbourhood.

Today I'll undertake one of life's most perilous tasks: trying to catch a train in the UK