Staunton, March 9 – Vladimir Putin’s acknowledgement that he personally decided upon and conducted a special operation to seize Crimea “opens a unique and limited-time window of opportunities” for the West to bring real pressure on him, divide his regime and force Moscow to change course, according to Slava Rabinovich. The Russian economist and blogger […]
Staunton, March 9 – It is a measure of just what a threat Vladimir Putin represents to neighboring countries that Aleksey Yanukevich, the leader of the Belarusian Popular Front Party, says that Alyaksandr Lukashenka, usually described as “the last dictator in Europe,” is now “a lesser evil” than the Kremlin imperialism the Kremlin leader is […]
Staunton, March 9 — Solvita Āboltiņa, chairman of the Latvian parliament’s security committee, says that the 100 NGOs in Latvia receiving money from Moscow are not “organizations concerned with the development of the culture and traditions of national minorities in Latvia.” Instead, the 100 Moscow-backed organizations the Security Police have identified are those which “are […]
Staunton, March 8 – Despite his efforts, Vladimir Putin is not a remake of Stalin and thus could be overthrown in a coup because he has not only violated the social contract he had with the Russian people but has with the murder of Boris Nemtsov shown that he is prepared to kill members of […]
Staunton, March 7 — One of the most positive aspects of the enormous number of holidays post-Soviet states have is that in advance of them journalists often focus on important issues that they otherwise neglect. March 8 is international women’s day, and in the region, many are writing about the status of women. Two articles […]
Staunton, March 6 – The disappearance of non-Russian cultures as a result of Moscow’s assimilationist policies continue to attract attention, but there is another trend which may prove to be equally or even more important: the revival of groups Russians had only incompletely assimilated and their reconstitution as separate peoples. One of these, says Neyola […]
Staunton, March 6 – The alliance of reformers in the CPSU nomenklatura and Soviet liberals who were prepared for various reasons to cooperate with them led to the defeat of the dissidents who rejected the system as a whole and condemned Russia again to suffer once again a return “to the ideology of Russian imperialism […]
Staunton, March 1 – The horror and revulsion all people of good will feel about the murder of Boris Nemtsov in the shadow of the Kremlin has led many to treat this latest crime as if it were something new. In fact, the killing of Nemtsov is only the latest example of Vladimir Putin’s much-tested […]
Staunton, March 6 – The Kremlin had no reason to be afraid of the impact of Boris Nemtsov’s conclusion that there are Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. Despite Moscow’s denials, everyone knows that is the case. But it did have reason to be worried about the sources of his information: the mothers of soldiers who […]
Staunton, March 5 – Budapest has announced that it has handed out Hungarian citizenship papers to 94,000 people in Trans-Carpathia in Western Ukraine in expedited fashion. The Hungarian official responsible for nationality policy says that this is part of a broader effort to boost the size of the country’s population and points out that two-thirds […]
