Staunton, April 9 – Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a close aide to Patriarch Kirill and the head of the Synod’s Department for Relations between the Church and Society, is pushing the notion of a popular or even socialist monarchy as the most appropriate form of government for Russia, an idea that has its roots in the […]
Staunton, April 10 – “The mental gap between Ukraine and Russia is growing, and the trajectories of the two country are ever more strongly diverging,” according to Maksim Artemyev in an assessment of new Ukrainian laws opening Soviet-era secret police archives, de-Sovietizing the country’s toponymy, and revising key judgments about the past. In a comment […]
Staunton, April 10 -It is a measure of how Moscow has tightened the screws on the media that Russia will “soon become a country in which there will be more blocked websites than working ones,” according to Svetlana Kuzevanova, a legal specialist at the Voronezh Center for the Defense of Media Rights. In an interview […]
Staunton, April 10 – Faced with superior NATO forces in the larger Baltic Sea region and the threat they pose in the first instance to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Leonid Nersisyan, military observer for the Regnum news agency, says that Moscow is prepared to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers which now oppose it. […]
Staunton, April 9 – Vladimir Putin’s goal in Ukraine remains regime change in Kyiv, something he had hoped his intervention in Crimea and Donbass would force the Ukrainians to do on their own. But that hasn’t happened, and now, the Kremlin leader is likely to launch a broader attack against Ukraine in the near future, […]
Staunton, April 7 – Russians want their government to take care of them and ensure a high standard of living, surveys routinely show, but they “do not believe in the possibility of influencing the institutions of power by civilized means” and thus are not inclined to try to hold the regime responsible, according to Sergey […]
Staunton, April 9 — Russian internal troops are currently conducting exercises in six of the countries federal districts — the North-West, Central, Volga, North Caucasus, South, and Crimean — to prepare them to counter any appearance of Maidan-like protests, according to an interior ministry press officer. The exercises which began on April 2 and will […]
Staunton, April 8 — During the first years of Soviet power, a Moscow newspaper published an article telling its readers how easy and potentially profitable it would be for them to form a national republic. According to the paper, they didn’t need a nation or anything like a set of institutions: they needed only paper […]
Staunton, April 9 — In what appears to be a response to Alexander Lukashenko’s recent declaration that Belarus will never become the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, a Moscow journalist says Belarusians must vote this year to become just that or face “the liquidation” of their country and “the fate of Ukraine.” In the […]
Staunton, April 7 – Just as the notion of a liberal Soviet Union proved to be a contradiction in terms, so too the Russian Federation in its current borders cannot become a democracy, according to Lech Walesa. It must first disintegrate and then some parts of it might be able to come back together in […]
