Staunton, April 19 – Vladimir Putin’s efforts to exclude the people of the Russian Federation from voting on the heads of federal subjects may be backfiring because it is leading some citizens there to take to the streets to demand that their current regional rulers be ousted and gaining confidence in their power, a development […]
Staunton, April 19 – Yury Dolinsky, a Russian analyst who specializes on the Baltic countries, says that most residents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, however much they say they are worried about the Russian threat, believe that their membership in NATO will keep Moscow from invading or force Moscow to withdraw if it does invade […]
Staunton, April 19 – – Bondo Dorovskikh, a Russian businessman, volunteered to go to Ukraine to “fight fascism” and defend “the Russian idea;” but he says he rapidly discovered the situation in the Donbass was not as he had been led to expect and that he had been enrolled “not in an army but in […]
Staunton, April 19 – – As it has taken to doing, Kyiv’s Delovaya Stolitsa newspaper publishes today a list of “the top five propagandistic myths, fakes and stupidities of the Kremlin” for the past week. Obviously, given the barrage of Moscow’s lies about Ukraine, these lists are highly selective, but they are also extremely instructive. […]
Staunton, April 15 — Because of demographic trends, Muslims are on their way to becoming the dominant group in Russian life sometime within the next generation or so, and they need to begin to think about what that will mean and how they should act in anticipation of that, according to Abdulla Rinat Mukhametov, a […]
Staunton, April 15 — Ukraine’s new legislation on de-sovietization is a necessary step toward restoring historic justice, Vadim Shtepa says. “Without the liquidation of the imposed heritage of communism…it is impossible to achieve the complete liberation of national mentality from soviet-imperial stereotypes and real Europeanization.” But the Russian regionalist writer says, “the brutal destruction of […]
Staunton, April 18 — There are many reasons why Vladimir Putin has been threatening the West with the possibility that he will use nuclear weapons against its allies, but one that has not received much attention is that he may be doing so because his country is rapidly losing its nuclear defense capability. That possibility […]
Staunton, April 13 — In a clearer indication of Moscow’s priorities than Vladimir Putin’s speeches and of Russia’s difficulties at home than Moscow TV, St. Petersburg activists who have collected three tons of humanitarian aid for fire victims in Khakasiya have been told by officials that there are no vehicles available because “everything is going […]
Staunton, April 13 — Moscow’s decision to ban the film Child 44 for its supposedly anti-Russian treatment of World War II is only one of the decisions the Russian authorities have made to restrict the right of Russians to view what they want. But these prohibitions are going to blow up in Moscow’s face: bans […]
Staunton, April 13 — Vladimir Putin by his aggressiveness and bluster has convinced many in his country and elsewhere that he and his system are extremely strong, but in addition to the obvious comparisons many make with the often pathetic response of Western leaders, Putinism suffers from serious and incurable weaknesses, according to Kseniya Kirillova. […]
