Staunton, April 23 – Not only have the number of people in the former non-Russian republics identifying as ethnic Russians fallen dramatically since 1991, but the number who speak Russian or who study it in school has fallen precipitously as well, a trend that means Vladimir Putin is reaching out to an ever-smaller group and […]
Staunton, April 23 – The best way to understand the events of the last several months, Stanislav Belkovsky argues, is to view them as a repetition of the August 1991 coup with only this difference: the leader of this coup is Vladimir Putin and the target of his radical shifts is the Putin of the […]
Staunton, April 22 – It is a measure of just how worried the leaders of countries bordering Russia are about the possibility that Vladimir Putin will build on his Crimean Anschluss by moving against their states that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka feels the need to deny that Minsk is oppressing ethnic Russians and to call on […]
Staunton, April 22 – In what is becoming a defining feature of the Putin regime, the Russian authorities are saying things that many people want to hear at exactly the same moment that they are doing things that directly contradict what they say. Today, the victims of that are the Crimean Tatars, a Moscow commentator […]
Staunton, April 22 – Vladimir Pastukhov suggests that Ukraine now faces the choice of concluding a humiliating “Brest peace” with Moscow, in which it would yield an enormous portion of its territory and population to preserve itself in the hopes of recovering its losses in the future, or risk the possibility that it disappears altogether. […]
Staunton, April 22 – Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” project of “empire instead of a nation state and dictatorship instead of democracy” is far more popular his country than calls for the development of a civic nation, Mariya Snegova says, but it will end, as all other such projects in Russian history have, with “a catastrophe” […]
Staunton, April 21 – Russian nationalism, “however strange this may seem” to its adherents and to others as well, in fact shares many the same structural features of feminism, according to Natalya Kholmogorova, herself a leading Russian nationalist commentator in Moscow. She argues that the two both involve “a community of people who are arithmetically […]
Staunton, April 21 – Latvia may be as prepared as any small country next to a very large one to defend itself against a military invasion. It has a modernized military, albeit one trained for peacekeeping rather than national defense, and it is a member of NATO, on whose Article Five Latvians rely. At least, […]
Staunton, April 21 – There is perhaps no better way to call attention to the way in which Vladimir Putin insists on one standard for his own country and a very different one for Ukraine and others than to imagine the position the Kremlin leader might have found himself in had he been asked what […]
Staunton, April 21 – The Geneva accords represent “a complete victory” for Vladimir Putin and “the complete capitulation of Europe and Ukraine,” which when translated out of diplomatic language gives the Kremlin leader “a mandate” to seize as much of Ukraine as he wants, according to Yuliya Latynina. On her Saturday evening program on Ekho […]
