Staunton, September 30 – At a time when Moscow is cutting spending on education and health and in an indication of the importance the Kremlin places on propaganda, the Russian government is going to increase the amount of money it will give to the television channel Russia Today or RT.com next year 41 percent over […]
Staunton, September 30 – Many Russians now believe that everyone in the world hates them and wishes their country ill, but that is not the case, Ruslan Gorevoy argues in Novaya Versiya. Russia and Russians even now have many friends: they just aren’t in the places where they were in Soviet times. In the current […]
Staunton, September 29 – Following the Crimean Anschluss, Russians have stopped focusing their anger on Nikita Khrushchev, who transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine, as a primary source of their problems with Ukrainians and shifted attention to the role Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin played in creating the current tensions between the two nations. […]
Staunton, September 29 – Concerned that Moscow might engineer a regime change in Belarus as a follow on to its actions in Ukraine, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been purging pro-Russian officials from his regime – but in a very quiet way lest he provoke Moscow as a result, according to Nasha Niva. The Belarusian daily reports […]
Staunton, September 29 – Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, the apostolic nuncio in Kyiv, has denounced Moscow for conduct “an undeclared war” against Ukraine that has destabilized the situation of that neighboring state. This follows his earlier call for the West to “more decisively intervene” to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. At the same time, Gullickson, 64 and […]
Staunton, September 29 – The 100,000-strong Muslim community of Kaliningrad is running out of options in the Russian legal system to secure land for the construction of a mosque in that Russian exclave and consequently will now appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, according to their lawyer Dagir Khasavov. But meanwhile, continuing opposition […]
Staunton, September 29 – The demolition of the statue of Lenin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has attracted international attention, with some seeing this as a provocation by one or another side in the war in Ukraine and others viewing it as an indication of the maturation of the Ukrainian revolution and a sign […]
Staunton, September 29 – Despite the propaganda victories Moscow has reaped from the presence of refugees from Ukraine in Russia and even the profits some Russian businesses have made from them, 45 percent of Russians now say the refugees should be sent back as soon as conditions permit, according to a new Russian Public Opinion […]
Staunton, September 29 – Vladimir Putin’s decision to end direct elections for mayors in the name of increasing central control will in fact have the opposite effect, Roman Revunov says, because it will allow governors to amass unprecedented power and be in a position to challenge Moscow or even lead their regions out of the […]
Staunton, September 28 – Just as it did in Ukraine, Moscow is preparing again to play the citizenship card in Estonia and Latvia, muddying the waters as to who is “a Russian” and who is thus part of Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” and worthy of Moscow’s defense whether any of them want that “defense” or […]
