Reese Erlich has won numerous journalism awards including a Peabody award. He’s also a freelance journalist who writes for CBS Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corp., NPR and VICE News, and his Foreign Correspondent column distributed nationally in the US.

Last year he published his latest book with the title The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran and What’s Wrong with U.S. Policy.

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I mentioned the pro-democracy protests in

Hong Kong a few weeks back, particularly the fact that a huge proportion of the

city’s population was taking part in them. Since I talked about them, the

protests have been covered widely in the western media, and they haven’t

dissipated, they are continuing every weekend.

It’s notable that in the meantime protests

have started in Moscow on a similar theme. People, mostly young people, are

taking to the streets complaining about the lack of democracy. There are some

notable similarities, but also big differences.

The main similarity is that they started in

much the same way, over a seemingly minor issue. In Hong Kong that was an

extradition bill that would have allowed authorities to forcibly take anyone

they arrested to China where the rule of law is much weaker, where the

government can basically lock up anyone they want.

In Moscow, it was about banning opposition

candidates from standing in elections for the Moscow local government. This is

a relatively minor issue, if Putin lost control of the local government there,

it would in theory barely cause a blip on his total control of the country, and

that was never going to happen anyway because the chances of more than a few of

those opposition candidates winning were remote.

But in reality, Putin runs a régime where

no uncontrolled opposition can be tolerated. If they can win a few seats in

this election, they can more the next time, then maybe a majority, and then

challenge Putin in more serious ways.