If Europe and the West want to understand what is happening in Russia, they should send observers not to the polling stations, but to Moscow's Basmanny Court, where the Constitution and rule of law are being unraveled on a daily basis.

Here, and not in any electoral race, is where the battle over the presidential succession is playing itself out. The contenders are a group of former KGB officers known as the siloviki, from the Russian word for strong.

Highlights from the battles between these warring factions include murders of politically connected figures and a spate of arrests of public officials on allegations of corruption - arrests instigated by members of one clan or another. The result is a group of jailed hostages from each of the silovik clans to be used as pawns in the power struggles.

Russia is far more volatile than anyone now wants to believe. We do ourselves no favor by generously pretending that Russia is going to hold some type of "flawed" vote, when the real election will be determined by the scorecard of the clan wars.

The pliant justice system in Russia is being incorporated into inter-clan warfare.

If the West should have one hope, it is that Russia's next president, Dmitri Medvedev, will call a truce among the warring Kremlin factions, reinstitute judicial independence and bring his country back from the brink at which it now perilously totters.

From the archive:

Russia appears to be a nation off of its crutches and seeking to define its place in the world. Yet Russia has singularly failed to make others see clearly what it wants, or see the world as it does—revealing a dangerous flaw in its foreign policy implementation.

A closer look at Russian foreign policy reveals a lack of strategic priorities and a Russia alone and adrift.

Today's global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam -- and it is the lesser of the two challenges. The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes.