Staunton, April 3 – In the wake of Crimea, Moscow is likely to increase pressure on Belarus to cooperate, but experts say there is little chance that the two countries will unite any time soon. Instead, Putin’s Crimean Anschluss is likely to make Belarus and other former Soviet republics even more leery than they already […]
Staunton, April 3 – Many Russians and some in the West believe that the Russian military could overrun Ukraine because of its superiority over Ukrainian forces, but such views ignore both the enormous challenges that any occupier of Ukraine would face and the reality that the Ukrainian military is in fact a far more serious […]
Staunton, April 2 – Vladimir Putin is driven less by the “imperial syndrome” some are pointing to than by his own sense of the weakness as a result of his continuing reliance on the export of natural resources and his opposition to “the internal West” which wants Russia to modernize, according to Kirill Rogov. As […]
Staunton, April 2 – Neither Russian elites nor the Russian people accepted the demise of the USSR and occasionally signaled that throughout the Yeltsin period, according to commentator Sergey Shelin. But in every case, the West preferred not to take notice of that reality and only now with Vladimir Putin’s actions is being forced to […]
Staunton, April 2 – Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea is echoing through the non-Russian nations within the Russian Federation, but it is also creating a new Ukrainian problem for the Kremlin leader in the Russian Far East where a former Japanese defense minister has noted that 60 percent of the inhabitants on the disputed Etorofu […]
Staunton, April 1 – Aleksandr Dugin, a Eurasianist who is close to the Kremlin, has told ethnic Russians in Ukraine that they must not cooperate with Kyiv in any way, that they must be ready to “act radically,” even to the point of sparking a civil war in that country, and that Moscow will support […]
Staunton, April 1 – By his actions of omission and commission, US President Barack Obama is allowing his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to strengthen and even legitimize Moscow’s occupation of Crimea, a bow to this violation of international law with far-reaching consequences, according to Andrey Illarionov. Illarionov lays out his case in four articles. In […]
Staunton, March 31 – Russia’s Anschluss of Crimea and Moscow’s various declarations about the right of nations – or at least some of them – to self-determination continue to echo through the Russian Federation, most recently among the Russian Germans who, viewing the Crimean events, want rehabilitation and the possible restoration of their republic. On […]
Staunton, March 31 – Moscow’s denunciation of the accords it had with Ukraine on the naval base in Sevastopol following Russia’s seizure of Crimea has attracted a great deal of attention, but a Ukrainian response, one that creates serious problems for the Russian military so far has not. In response, Vladimir Mukhin writes in today’s […]
Staunton, March 31 – Confronted with Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and its demands for the federalization of Ukraine, the Ukrainian foreign ministry has countered by calling for every republic within the Russian Federation to hold a referendum about their future status and possible independence. Moscow has been pushing for the federalization of Ukraine for two […]
