Staunton, June 16 – The war in Ukraine is changing the nuclear balance in the world in three ways: it is leading Russia and the US to slow their cutbacks in the number of war heads, it is causing countries thinking about giving up their nuclear aspirations to revisit the situation, and it is allowing […]
Staunton, June 15 – Today, Dmitry Bukovsky of Kyiv’s Delovaya Stolitsa provides a particularly rich harvest of the Kremlin’s “top propaganda myths, fakes and stupidities” of the last week, a collection that simultaneously shows how duplicitous and foolish Moscow commentaries are and how skeptical everyone should be about them. The five are the following: 1. […]
Staunton, June 15 – That Vladimir Putin lives in a different reality than do other world leaders is now more or less common ground. Now, two commentators have described respectively what the Kremlin leader dreams about and what his worst nightmare might turn out to be. In a commentary in Kyiv’s Novoye Vremya, Yury Felshtinsky, […]
Staunton, June 14 – “Reconciliation is a good thing, and hostility is bad,” Igor Klyamkin says. “But there are reconciliations and reconciliations,” some of which open a path to a better future and others of which point to the return of the evils of the past. Unfortunately, the one on offer in Russia today is […]
Staunton, June 13 – The toughening of the West’s position on Ukraine very much in evidence at the G7 meeting reflects the fact that Vladimir Putin has fundamentally misread the situation and not taken advantage of the face-saving measures which the West had been offering him, according to Vitaly Portnikov. The Kremlin leader “sincerely believed […]
Staunton, June 12 – Not satisfied with the three-year moratorium imposed by St. Petersburg governor Georgy Poltavchenko on changing street and other place names in the northern capital, the city’s legislative assembly is preparing a law that would permanently ban any such changes, including the replacement of Soviet-era names with tsarist-era ones. Boris Vishnevsky, one […]
Staunton, June 11 – Many regional experts say that Tajikistan is the Central Asian country ISIS forces are most likely to attack, not only because the population is likely to be receptive to its appeals against corruption and for social justice but also because the Tajikistan army is too weak and underfunded to be able […]
Staunton, June 11 – Much has been made of the fact that the US has become dependent on certain Russian rocket motors and Russian space vehicles to service the International Space Station, but Nikolay Testoyedov, a specialist on the Russian space program, says that the dependency is actually the other way around. According to him, […]
Staunton, June 11 – Novgorod oblast was technically in default earlier this year because of poor management and because Moscow paid the region what it owed a month after debt payments became due, Natalya Zubarevich says, but she suggests that there won’t be a series of defaults. What there will be is something worse – […]
Staunton, June 11 – The attempt by Varvara Karaulova, a Russian who became a Muslim and sought to join ISIS, has sparked a new wave of hysteria about Islam in the Russian media, with speculations about the number of ethnic Russian Muslims, the prospects for a Muslim majority in the Russian population, and the possibility […]
