Tag: South Ossetia

In Russia This Week, you will find links to the stories of Russia Update in the last week and to special features, plus an article following up on the news and trending topics below. Top Stories: –Volunteer Urals Fighters Return Home from ‘Lugansk People’s Republic’ –Residents of Chita Assemble to Protest Governor’s Inaction as Wildfire […]

A year ago on March 18, 2014, just two days after the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech to his constituents and State Duma deputies regarding the referendum vote that made historical headlines. Despite reverberating criticism from the West and shock from Ukraine, Putin reiterated to his audience that the referendum […]

Staunton, February 25 — When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, the United States and other Western countries and with the support of the leaderships of the former Soviet republics, including the Russian Federation, insisted that the administrative borders of the union republics should become without change the international borders of the new states. The West […]

Staunton, February 24 – The war in Ukraine must be seen as a direct “continuation” of the decay and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Russia and many other of the countries which emerged from it to develop the kind of political institutions necessary for stability, according to Moscow commentator Ivan Sukhov. […]

Staunton, February 6 – In their rush to end the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, Western governments are in danger of creating a far larger and long-lasting problem for the region and themselves in the future, according to Bacho Korchilava, because if the West legitimates a role for Russia in the Donbas, Moscow will be able […]

Staunton, November 25 – The Russian-Ukrainian war now going on could have begun in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fact that it didn’t says a great deal about the attitudes of Russian political leaders then and how much they have changed in the intervening period, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a post on […]

Staunton, November 16 – Demonstrations in Tbilisi and Kyiv on November 15 are the latest and most public indication of a development that not only challenges Vladimir Putin’s seizure of territory in Georgia and Ukraine but also calls into question Russia’s earlier occupation of other non-Russian lands. Moscow has always tried to deal with its […]

Staunton, October 18 – At his press conference yesterday, Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka made so many remarkable statements that it is hard to know where to begin. But perhaps the most significant was that “Smolensk and Bryansk,” two oblasts now within the Russian Federation, are “ours, but Belarus doesn’t need them now.” While most people […]

This past week during the prolonged battle for the Donetsk Airport, there has been a series of Russian-backed separatist propaganda videos, as well as Russian state TV news programs reporting from the same scenes and using militants’ footage. These have been widely discussed on social media because they give away the fact that the militants […]

Staunton, September 17 – Russia can annex South Ossetia without worrying about the reaction of the West, Yana Amelina says, but it must do so in the near future or both Russia and South Ossetia will face “quite dangerous geopolitical explosions” in the Caucasus given the reordering of power relations in that region. Amelina, a […]