Staunton, May 24 — The Russian government cannot afford to maintain its current levels of military spending for long because its shift of resources to the military sector is threatening the rest of the Russian economy and because its reserve fund will be insufficient to pay for this spending for more than another year or […]
Staunton, May 24 — Since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its continuing subversion of other parts of Ukraine, many have asked whether one or another of the Baltic countries might be Vladimir Putin’s next target, given that his strategic goal is clearly the breaking apart of Europe and the United States and discrediting or even […]
Staunton, May 25 — Given the recrudescence of Soviet institutions in the Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbass, ever more people are playing the game of “what if” – “what if” the August 1991 putsch or October 1993 clash in Moscow had ended another way or “what if” the anti-Bolshevik White Russians had defeated Lenin and returned […]
Staunton, May 25 — Dmitry Bukovsky of Kyiv’s “Delovaya stolitsa” continues his series, “The Top 5 Propaganda Myths, Fakes and Stupidities of the Kremlin for the Week.” And this week, Russia has really outdone itself with the very top item being a claim that Vladimir Putin was either Prince Vladimir who baptized Kievan Rus or […]
Staunton, May 23 — The EU’s Eastern Partnership program has proven incapable of being a buffer zone between Europe and Russia and must be radically reformed or scrapped altogether given that for foreseeable future, Moscow will dominate those states in the east which are not fully part of the European Union itself, according to Vitaly […]
Staunton, May 21 — Many in Russia and elsewhere have been horrified by the personal tragedy of the forced marriage of a young girl to a 57-year-old Chechen that Ramzan Kadyrov and some Russians have defended, but they should be more concerned about how this event sets the stage for a new Chechen war in […]
Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]
Staunton, May 21 — Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia, points to an inconvenient truth that few want to recognize: no frozen conflicts in the former Soviet space will be resolved as long as Russia retains its veto in the UN Security Council and thus is in a position to block moves toward a […]
Staunton, May 20 – The investigation of the murder of Boris Nemtsov shows that the first-ever “killer agency” capable of handling the entire course of a killing, from the selection of a victim to the disposition of the case in such a way that those behind it will not be held responsible, has been organized […]
Staunton, May 20 – Vladimir Putin wants to make the number of hours of Russian-language instruction in Russian schools inviolable, something that will mean non-Russian parents will be able to secure instruction in their native languages only by sacrificing other programs and thus putting the future academic and professional careers of their children at risk. […]
