Internet, its online media sources and numerous digital services have become an essential part of international data exchange as well as a powerful instrument to influence public opinion worldwide. What countries are the most advanced users of the new digital tools? A research project conducted at Tel Aviv University's Department of Communications into the practice of "digital diplomacy" yielded rather unexpected results.
 

As the last of the thirty-seven participating countries weighed in (Israel, the Netherlands, Iceland, Slovenia), a dark-horse winner emerged: Conchita Wurst. A glamorous drag queen, the Austrian candidate was decked out in a long, glittering dress and sported a full beard.  “It’s a firm and clear rebuke against Putin’s anti-L.G.B.T. legislation and people who support it,” William Lee Adams, the editor-in-chief of WiwiBloggs.com, the Internet’s most-read Eurovision Web site, said. 

Vladimir Putin uses an invisible army of social media propagandists, in addition to conventional media, to support his narrative of an out-of-control Ukraine, to spread fabrications of atrocities by Ukrainian extremists, and to unleash destabilizing rumors on east Ukraine.

Putting his personal seal on the annexation of Crimea, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived in the naval port of Sevastopol on Friday, where he used the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany to assert that Moscow had the right to take over the Black Sea peninsula.

As Ukraine's political divisions play out on the geopolitical stage, the country also faces an unsettling schism among its main churchgoers.  Now Filaret says that Ukraine's growing political crisis is a signal from above that it's time to unite all of the Orthodox faithful into a single church.

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the internet as a CIA project. During a speech at a media forum in St. Petersburg, he said Russia would have to "fight for its interests" online. New laws passed in the last few days show just how serious he was.

In spite of ongoing tensions in Ukraine, which have seriously soured relations between Russia and the U.S. & Europe, Moscow has not altogether forgotten the Western Hemisphere. While Lavrov’s trip did not end in any particularly major deals between Moscow and his Latin American hosts, the visit came months after declarations by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that the Russian armed forces require some form of overseas military facilities.

Washington and Brussels are the heroes of the Ukrainian saga, if you believe the Western media. Russian President Vladimir Putin is cast as the Big Bad Russian Bear, US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are the Democratic A-Team.