Staunton, November 20 – Legislators in the two autonomous districts in Tyumen region and the one in Arkhangelsk region, the three remaining “matryoshka” federal subjects, this week simultaneously asked for the elimination of direct elections of their governors in favor of one in which the local legislators themselves would make the decision. Moscow officials say […]
Staunton, November 20 – Given the low level of formal institutionalization of Russian social and political life, those who seek to understand it regularly discuss it in terms of bands or clans, typically analytic constructs in which the individuals involved are linked together by personal ties based on economic interests, past service in particular organizations […]
Staunton, November 20 – Russian civic identity “does not contradict” ethnic identities either of ethnic Russians or non-Russians, Leokadiya Drobizheva says, as long as economic and social conditions are good. But when they are deteriorating as now, ever more people in Russia connect that development with ethnic factors and the two identities begin to split […]
Staunton, November 20 – Sectoral sanctions are not enough to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and no one in the West wants to fight a war against Russia. But because of the nature of the Russian elite, including Putin, the West has a means of stopping Putin in his tracks, a means it has […]
Staunton, November 14 – Renewed calls by some Ukrainians to shift the alphabet of their national language from one based on Cyrillic characters to a Latin-based script in order to escape from the influence of Moscow and be closer to the West has infuriated Russian nationalists, who say that there is no chance Ukraine will […]
Staunton, November 13 – Vladimir Putin is proposing the kind of grand bargain to Barack Obama that Hitler proposed to Neville Chamberlain and then to Joseph Stalin, in which the West would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in exchange for Moscow’s cooperation on Iran, according to Andrey Illarionov. Chamberlain rejected that bargain but Stalin did […]
Staunton, November 19 – The extremely low level of knowledge about traditional Islam among immigrants to Russia from Central Asia is leading to the growth of radicalism in Russia, Moscow experts say, a finding that applies not only to gastarbeiters (labor migrants) but also to indigenous Muslims in the Russian Federation. Both Russian researchers and Western […]
Staunton, November 19 – Faced with a united front in the West, Andrey Piontkovsky says, Putin may seek “to freeze the Ukrainian conflict and then to save face as a patriot of ‘the Russian world’ decide to take certain steps in the Caucasus as he is doing now,” something that threatens all three of the […]
Staunton, November 19 – There are “no influential forces in the Kremlin now” calling for peace in Ukraine or with Russia’s other neighbors, independent Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet says. There are only various groups calling for war and differing only on when, where and how to carry out a full-scale war with Ukraine. In a […]
Staunton, November 19 – The Crimean Tatar Resistance Organization has launched an online petition drive to gain international recognition as the indigenous people of the peninsula, a step that Ukraine did not take earlier and that Russia has not taken since the Anschluss, and one that the organizers say is necessary to preserve their national […]
