Staunton, November 6 – By annexing Ukraine’s Crimea, Moscow has acquired a more serious ethno-political problem than xenophobic attitudes toward migrants or violence in the North Caucasus, Vladimir Ryzhkov says. It must now deal with the Crimean Tatars, their aspirations, and their relations with the Russian occupation regime. But even more than that, Russian politician […]
Staunton, November 6 – Ukrainians and Russians differ in many ways, Vadim Shtepa says, but perhaps the most important is that Ukrainians “feel themselves masters of their own country” but Russians “do not feel” the same way. Instead, among residents of the Russian Federation, there is a sense that the powers control everything and the […]
Staunton, November 5 – Even though some Western leaders cannot bring themselves to describe what Russia is doing in Ukraine as “an invasion,” Ukraine today is under a mortal threat, and according to Arkady Babchenko, Kyiv and the Ukrainian people are fighting not just to recover the Donbas and Crimea but for their survival as […]
Staunton, November 5 – Ever more commentators are suggesting that a new round of Russian military aggression in Ukraine is likely in order to secure a Russian-controlled land corridor to Crimea, an action that some analysts say would cost Russia more killed and wounded than it has suffered in any conflict since World War II. […]
Staunton, November 7 – In a comment the Warsaw newspaper Fakt described as extremely disturbing, Romuald Szeremietiew, a former Polish deputy defense minister, says that if Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine or in the Baltic region, the West likely would not react in kind. His suggestion follows the Kremlin leader’s incautious and outrageous […]
Staunton, November 3 – – Demonstrations in the Russian Federation yesterday on the Day of National Unity highlighted how divided Russians now are, a pattern that led some to argue the Kremlin will not permit such marches in the future –or even that these divisions constituted the end of Russian nationalism. But however that may […]
Staunton, November 3 – – One of the most frequently invoked explanations for the inability of leaders to cope with a challenge is that it is something fundamentally new that they could not have been expected to recognize, understand, and know precisely how to respond. That has been the case in Ukraine and the West […]
Staunton, November 3 – Vladimir Putin has a very clear strategy in Ukraine: first, sow panic among Ukrainians and the West and then wait, then provoke Ukrainians into doing things that distance them from the West, and then wait; invade when both Ukrainians and the West are off balance; and then repeat the process. Such […]
Staunton, November 2 – In his classic novel, “A Day Longer than an Age,” the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov offered the powerful image of “mankurts,” people deprived of their identities and thus transformed into more pliant and subservient slaves of others. And this image was applied by many to the peoples of Central Asia in […]
Staunton, November 2 — Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, says that the ongoing Ukrainian crisis is dividing Russian society to an extent comparable to the ways similar to the demise of the Soviet Union and the war in Chechnya and that as such this crisis represents “a turning point” in Russia’s national […]
