Staunton, October 17 – “To a great extent, no one is administering Russia” or interested in investigating what is actually going on, according to Simon Kordonsky, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Instead, Russia “lives by inertia,” with the state being unaware of how uninformed it is and the population living according to […]
Staunton, October 19 – One of the most memorable passages of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is when one GULAG inmate explains to another that Moscow has decided what time it is — regardless of where the sun is located in the sky — prompting the latter to speculate that the […]
Staunton, October 19 – In an indication of Vladimir Putin’s isolation even in the former Soviet space and of the weakness of the CIS as an institution, not a single president of a member state publicly supported the Kremlin leader’s bombing campaign in Syria at the CIS summit in Kazakhstan, Arkady Dubnov notes. The Russian […]
Staunton, October 16 – Having already shown its contempt for the other Caspian littoral states by launching cruise missiles from its squadron on that sea, Moscow will be conducting joint naval exercises with Iran, again apparently without consulting Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, according to Iran’s Fars news agency. Ahmad Reza Baqeri, an Iranian naval captain, […]
Staunton, October 15 – The Dutch report on the shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner last year released this week has attracted enormous attention but the report the International Investigative Group promises to release by early next year of the basis of the Dutch study may deserve even more. Together, they should give Vladimir Putin […]
Staunton, October 15 “It is not excluded,” Irek Murtazin writes in Novaya Gazeta, that the terrorist act blocked by the FSB on October 11 was nothing more than a training exercise organized to boost vigilance among a Russian population that “totally distrusts” the law enforcement agencies and thus can be mobilized only by something like […]
Staunton, October 15 – In an interview with Radio Poland’s Artem Filatov, Aleksandr Nevzorov, former host of the Russian TV program “600 Seconds,” argues that Russians are predisposed to want war, and indeed it would have been impossible to “zombify” 86 percent of Russians into supporting Vladimir Putin and his aggressive policies if Russians weren’t […]
Staunton, October 12 – The creation by the United States of the Trans-Pacific Partnership signals both the continuing American role as the key pole in international affairs and the declining importance of Europe, developments that “paradoxically” have more serious consequences for Russia than any other country, Vadim Shtepa says. On the one hand, it highlights […]
Staunton, October 12 – Even in Russia where lying has become “an officially approved social norm” and where leaders lie on big things and small, even they find it impossible to lie all the time because to maintain consistency in a world where everything is a lie is impossible and thus they sometimes perhaps unintentionally […]
Staunton, October 11 – Estimating the real costs, direct and indirect, of a military conflict is always difficult because so many factors need to be considered, but Moscow economist Andrey Illarionov says that even if one ignores direct human and property losses, Vladimir Putin’s wars are currently costing Russia approximately US $94 billion every year. […]
