Staunton, March 24 – Even though the Russian government currently repairs less than one percent of its horrific roads in many regions, Moscow has announced plans to build a superhighway and rail line extending across the Russian north to the Bering Straits and a tunnel to Alaska, a project in which enormous sums will be […]
Staunton, March 25 – Positive developments with regard to radical extremist Russian nationalists during 2014 – including a falloff in the number of attacks on immigrants – were not the result of state policy but rather the refocusing of the attention of such people on events in Ukraine, according to SOVA’s annual report on such […]
Staunton, March 26 – In Vedomosti today, two scholars based in Paris and Los Angeles say that the new crop of dictators in the world today get by with a minimum use of force even at times of “moderate economic difficulties” and prefer to maintain their power by “an intensification of censorship and propaganda. Russia’s […]
Staunton, March 26 – Vladimir Putin is “not Yeltsin’s successor but Stalin’s,” and Sergey Lavrov is the successor of Stalin’s commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, Slava Rabinovich argues. Consequently, the world must “begin the difficult but necessary process of excluding Russia from the UN Security Council” just as the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. […]
Staunton, March 25 – Moscow is beginning to recognize that it cannot control Islam in Russia via its preferred method of creating a single hierarchical structure, Aleksey Malashenko says. Islam in Russia like Islam in the world at large is simply too diverse for such a structure to work. For the past two decades, leaders […]
Staunton, March 23 — Many people around world have been focusing on and been horrified by the meeting of representatives of extreme right, even fascist parties in St. Petersburg over the weekend, but fewer have paid attention to another aspect of Moscow’s outreach — to separatists around the world whose efforts may help Vladimir Putin […]
Staunton, March 23 — Not all, but “the overwhelming majority of Germans sincerely believed” what Hitler said, just as not all but the overwhelming majority of Russians sincerely believe what Vladimir Putin says, according to Semyon Gluzman. But when the Kremlin leader falls, most Russians will say as the Germans did in 1945: “’We didn’t […]
Staunton, March 23 — “The Russian occupation regime” in Crimea is “worse than the Soviet one,” according to Mustafa Cemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, in large part because Vladimir Putin couldn’t find a Ramzan Kadyrov-type leader among them and thus has chosen the path of direct rather than indirect repression instead. Speaking before […]
Staunton, March 23 — Budget documents may seem dry reading most of the time, but they often provide clearer indications than anything else of what the priorities of rulers are. Vladimir Putin’s new budget numbers show that for him, propaganda is more important than the Russian people and even more important than national defense. Given […]
Staunton, March 23 — As Russians become aware of the costs that Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine entail, ever fewer of them in the Russian Federation itself say they support what he has been doing. But backing for Putin’s policies remains high in the Russian diaspora where its members have easier access to information sources […]
