Staunton, July 19 – Moscow has disbanded two of the agencies it created to integrate occupied Crimea – the Ministry for Crimean Affairs and the Commission for the Social-Economic Development of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol – but in its place, it has decided to dispatch Russian officials as new “commissars” to run the […]
Staunton, July 19 – An article in the current issue of Sovershenno Sekretno asks whether there is a line between Russian Orthodox Church activists and those who engage in pogrom-like violence. It concludes sadly that there is not — and that church activists and those engaged in attacks on other groups are increasingly one and […]
Staunton, July 18 – By including in the Ukrainian constitutional provision specifying that Kyiv will come up with a new law governing certain portions of Donetsk and Lugansk Regions, the Verkhovna Rada has in effect adopted “a pro-Putin constitutional model for Ukraine” and given the Kremlin leader three dangerous victories over Kyiv, according to Andrey […]
Staunton, July 18 – For the last 12 years, the FSB has maintained a list of those organizations which Russian courts have identified as terrorist. There are now 23 on the list, but it is arbitrary, incomplete and fails to provide any indication of the relative threat posed by these groups to Russia and the […]
Staunton, July 19 – The trade-off US President Barack Obama made with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to get a deal on Iran “is acquiring new and, in our time, somewhat unexpected aspects,” Andrey Illarionov says, colors that unfortunately suggest “Russia, the US, Iran and the EU are together, together without Ukraine,” even “together against […]
Staunton, July 15 – Even if such steps would bring peace, Ukrainians oppose giving special status to the Russian-controlled Donbass by 56.1 percent to 26.4 percent and oppose transforming their country into a federal state as a whole 59.1 percent to 21 percent, according to a new poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of […]
Staunton, July 15 – The clashes in Mukachevo lasted no more than an hour and were not that different from those which have taken place elsewhere in Ukraine over the past year, but according to Yevgeny Krutikov, a journalist for Moscow’s Vzglyad newspaper, there are seven “synergistic” reasons why these events have “shaken” Kyiv to […]
Staunton, July 20 – Some weeks bring more, some less, but every week produces a rich harvest of manifestations of “official insanity” in Russia, according to Vera Yurchenko of Moscow’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper. On July 20, she published her “top 10” list from the last seven days and asks readers to vote for their favorites. […]
Staunton, July 13 – The conflict in Mukachevo is a direct threat to Ukraine because it raises the question as to whether Kyiv has lost its monopoly on the use of force, something every effective state must maintain. And consequently, Moscow wants to promote the fighting there as much as possible to make its case […]
Staunton, July 13 – Remzi Ilyasov, deputy head of the Moscow-imposed State Council of Crimea, says that a World Congress of Crimean Tatars scheduled to be held in Ankara July 31 through August 2 are “a very dangerous measure” that will only be the occasion for making “some sort of declarations” against Crimea as part […]
