Last week, Russian ultranationalist Aleksandr Dugin, mentor to the pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine who has orchestrated mass support on social media, was denouncing as a “mutineer” Aleksandr Khodakovsky, head of the Vostok Battalion in southeastern Ukraine. Dugin posted on his VKontakte page that Khodakovsky was only running a rump Vostok with only 50 loyal […]
Updated Daily. Refugees continue to flee armed conflict in southeastern Ukraine into Russia, but questions remain about how many of them there are, as both official and news reports differ substantially, and international relief organizations and journalists are not let into the border towns under a state of emergency. The retreat of Col. Igor Strelkov […]
The exaggeration of refugee numbers persists by the Russian government and state propaganda outlets, which is unfortunate because the debate about the authenticity of the numbers and lack of access to the region by credible independent humanitarian organizations mean that those refugees who do exist are not getting sufficient attention. The Kremlin’s lead propaganda outlet […]
Boris Rozhin, editor of Golos Sevastopolya and a popular blogger under the name “Colonel Cassad,” published a LiveJournal entry 7 July speculating on the origins of the campaign that has begun to discredit Col. Igor Strelkov, self-declared commander in chief of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” He traces it to an attempt to orchestrate a scenario […]
A press conference in Donetsk today organized by Russian ultranationalist leftist Sergei Kurginyan, together with pro-Russian separatist fighters in southeast Ukraine turned into a shouting match as the fighters accused this Muscovite championing their cause, who has been finding them supposedly private channels of military aid, of being out of touch with their war and […]
Updated Daily. The Russian government’s numbers of “110,000” refugees from the armed conflict in Ukraine are clearly exaggerated, even if there are likely at least tens of thousands, but with reporters barred from the area and towns under declared states of emergency, it’s difficult to get the real story. The US government has added Chechen […]
Russian-backed separatists fighting in southeastern Ukraine have not always been willing to acknowledge the extent of casualties and mortalities in battle. Frequent gunfire and disruption in communications have made it difficult both to count and to bury the dead. But last week, a spokesman for the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR) held a press conference […]
Updated Daily. The Russian finance minister has admitted that the government has raided the pension savings of ordinary Russians to pay for the forcible annexation of the Crimea — and will not be returning the funds. Opposition blogger Alexey Navalny continues to be harassed with libel suits and fabricated criminal cases — as well as […]
Updated Daily. Yet another provocation against State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, this one involving an outright fabrication of quotes. Will the Russian government end up blocking Twitter or will the American social media company’s executives manage to make a workable deal? The killing of two Russian state TV journalists has sparked a debate about reporters’ […]
Elena Kostyuchenko, special correspondent for the independent news site Novaya Gazeta, has followed up on the “Cargo 200” story of bodies of Russian fighters returned to Russia from Ukraine that was begun by Ekho Moskvy and continued by Novaya Gazeta, which we covered and excerpted in translation here and here. Kostyuchenko follows the story of […]
