Early this morning, Moscow-based New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers was detained by the South Ossetian KGB as he tried to cross into Mogabruni, an Ossetian village on the border with Georgia, which claims its territory.

What do the oligarch owner of the Evening Standard, possible murderer of renegade spy Alexander Litvinenko and a former deputy prime minister of Russia have in common? All three are entering the race to become mayor of a Black sea resort town with total population of 402,000. This town is Sochi and it will host the winter Olympics in 2014.

While America's Santellis and Limbaughs try to create a populist upswell against Obama, the new face of idiotic Russian populism is a young, blond Putin-ite named Maria Sergeyeva. The 24-year-old blogger bounded onto the national stage last January with her fiery speech at a pro-Kremlin rally, telling crowds she was “certain” Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev would “protect” her from the financial crisis. There's nothing particularly novel about her Nashi-esque positions, but when Sergeyeva says the Ukrainian-Russian gas dispute is an American plot, that foreign cars are Trojan Horses, or that the Central Asian immigrants should go home, people listen. Must be her delivery?

Okay, some final thoughts on Friday’s “reset” fiasco in Geneva, where Hillary Clinton’s joke gift for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bombed due to a translation error. As the entire world has already reported, the secretary of state’s little red button bore the English word “reset” — a reference to comments Joe Biden made a month ago about pushing the “reset button” on U.S.-Russian relations — and what was supposed to be its Russian equivalent transliterated into Latin script. Normally, we would let something so highly covered die its already drawn-out death, but lo, we have an exclusive two cents to get off our chests. Ahem.

It's an exercise in synchronized absurdity: Two opposing law initiatives in Russia united in their assault on reason and free speech. The first, a government proposal to make denial of the Soviet victory in World War II a crime. The second, a proposal by the liberal Yabloko party to outlaw the glorification of Stalin and Bolshevism. Passing either would essentially fling open the door to thoughtcrime prosecution in Russia, heretofore merely ajar.

It’s not often we’re compelled to start a post with the word “Um,” but that about sums it up. Unless you’re web-surfing at a Rush Limbaugh Mardi Gras party, you might think twice before linking to a Julia Gorin comedy routine in public. On her website, Gorin describes herself as “among the most recognized names in conservative comedy”; she’s also author of the book Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary, and an active op-ed contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Jewish World Review. No, Gorin’s not the first to link an Obama administration with both communism and terrorism, though she claims to have coined the term “Communislam.” But hey, we’re not Politico here; we’re telling you all this because she’s originally from the former Soviet Union, and she often works the whole “Russian” bit into her multi-phobic shtick. Thanks for contributing to the stereotype of the racially prejudiced, if not altogether jaw-droppingly clueless Russian, Ms. Gorin. As if we don’t have enough to deal with already.

One month ago we told you about a key piece of evidence in the murder case of Kremlin critic and human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya: a video presentation allegedly containing footage of Politkovskaya’s assassin. The trouble then was that the video "went missing" and the trial was put on hold while somebody looked around for a copy. According to British newspaper The Guardian, however, the video itself is as baffling as the fact that it had been “misplaced.” For one thing, it shows a confident assassin entering Politkovskaya’s secured apartment building wearing one cap, and exiting in another. And that’s just a taste of the sloppy and bewildering trial proceedings, which famously ended February 19 with the unanimous acquittal of the three men accused of aiding in the assassination. Reportedly, even Politkovskaya’s children felt that given the “fiasco” of the court procedures, a guilty verdict was inconceivable.

The meeting sounds like a screenwriter’s dream: incarcerated ex-oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, flying across Siberia to the former’s trial in Moscow — on the latter’s presidential plane. Strange as it seems, eyewitnesses who saw the plane before takeoff believe it really happened.