Staunton, April 11 -“The further ideology spreads through the country, the weaker the institution of political leadership becomes,” according to Tatyana Stanovaya, who argues that “first the leader becomes dependent on ideological positions, then the personality factor dissolves and finally it becomes unimportant for the system who stands at the head.” Consequently, the senior analyst […]
Staunton, April 11 – Moscow can’t afford having the Donbass become a frozen conflict with an unrecognized state like Transnistria or Nagorno-Karabakh: its economy cannot exist independently and its population is far beyond the capacity of the Russian state to subsidize for very long, according to Pavel Felgengauer. The implications of the Moscow military analyst’s […]
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 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 […]
Staunton, April 7 — Moscow officials are asserting and some in the West are accepting the notion that local officials in Crimea are to blame for any problems with the registration of Crimean Tatar media outlets such as ATR television, but that is a lie in the case of the former and a self-deception on […]
Staunton, April 7 — Eurasianism by definition is diverse because it argues that Russia to one degree or another has roots in both Europe and Asia, with some of its advocates stressing one and others the other. But few ever went as far in stressing the Asian nature of Russia as Erendzhen Khara-Davan whose ideas […]
