Staunton, September 29 No one should conclude that the current lull in the fighting in the Donbass marks the end of Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine, according to Valentin Badrak, head of the Kyiv Center for the Military, Conversion and Disarmament. Instead, it points to a shift toward more subversive actions inside the rest of Ukraine. […]
Staunton, September 28 Vladimir Putin has nothing positive to offer toward the resolution of any of the crises he has helped create, but he has succeeded in getting a meeting today with US President Barack Obama because the Kremlin leader has shown himself capable of causing ever more crises, something others want to prevent if […]
Staunton, September 25 The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and often strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too […]
Staunton, September 25 Valery Tishkov, former head of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology, says that Moscow should not grant “compatriot” status to ethnic Circassians now in war-torn Syria, thus allowing them to return to their ancestral homeland more easily, because such a step would open the way for radical Islamists to enter Russia. Officials and […]
Staunton, September 24 Statements by Russian officials and pro-Kremlin commentators that Salafi Islam is spreading in Russia and now threatens “traditional” Russian Islam are by themselves exacerbating tensions to the point of violence between the two — clashes Moscow may hope to exploit or to justify repression but that may cost it control of the […]
Staunton, September 24 The great Russian memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam once observed that “happy is that country in which the despicable will at least be despised.” On that measure, Putin’s Russia is an increasingly unhappy place where ever more despicable things past and present are being justified or even presented as positive goods. In a commentary […]
Staunton, September 24 The apparent agreement of US President Barack Obama to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin next week in New York to discuss Syrian affairs represents a new Munich in which one side focuses on “peace in our time” and the other pockets recognition of his aggression while planning for more, Andrey Illarionov […]
Staunton, September 22 Vladimir Putin and other dignitaries attended the re-opening of the Cathedral Mosque in Moscow today. Russian media celebrated this as the largest mosque in Europe; they mostly did not focus on the fact that Moscow’s Muslim community is the largest in any European capital or that the Russian city has only three […]
Staunton, September 22 – Russia faces a humanitarian catastrophe of extraordinary proportions this winter, Konstantin Borovoy says, with many Russians now not simply below the poverty line but at risk of survival, a trend that the Russian government has implicitly acknowledged by introducing ration cards for certain categories of the population. Unless Moscow gets enough […]
Staunton, September 20 – Faced with ever greater economic problems at home and isolation abroad, Vladimir Putin needs to freeze the conflict in the Donbass in such a way that Russians won’t begin asking questions about why he went there in the first place, Aleksandr Rabinovich says. And consequently, he is turning up the heat […]
