Staunton, September 18 – Many commentators in Moscow and the West see parallels between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi one – its authoritarianism, its attacks on minorities and its pursuit of Lebensraum for “the Russian world.” But Igor Eidman takes the next step and draws specific parallels between Nazi figures and Russian ones. […]
Staunton, September 18 – The world must end its “shameful silence” about the intensifying “moral terror” Moscow and its agents are waging against the Crimean Tatars to drive them again from their homeland or to force those who do not go to accept the status of “second class” citizens on the occupied Ukrainian peninsula, according […]
Staunton, September 17 – If an ordinary Russian doesn’t know the exact population of Moscow, that is a shortcoming, but not a tragedy. However, if the Russian government “doesn’t know how many people live in a small village,” that is a tragedy because as a result, “doctors, teachers, policemen and then, the entire population itself […]
Staunton, September 17 – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion at the end of August that the people of Tatarstan should have the right to decide the title of their republic leader has opened a Pandora’s box with some in other republics now demanding the retention of the title “president” for themselves. Yesterday, Murtaza Rakhimov, the […]
Staunton, September 17 – Russia can annex South Ossetia without worrying about the reaction of the West, Yana Amelina says, but it must do so in the near future or both Russia and South Ossetia will face “quite dangerous geopolitical explosions” in the Caucasus given the reordering of power relations in that region. Amelina, a […]
Staunton, September 17 – Many of the leaders of the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria come from Muslim regions of the Russian Federation, and they plan to launch attacks in its regions, coming in via Afghanistan and Central Asia rather than the more direct but more difficult route across Turkey and Iran, according […]
Staunton, September 17 – Vladimir Putin has no need of Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Crimea, Aleksandr Podrabinek says. He has moved against all of them “not for territory but for his own self-assertion and personal power, things which only the state of war can guarantee him.” That is how Putin began his rise to […]
Staunton, September 16 – Moscow’s demands for a voice in the definition of the policies of the Ukrainian state are “something unheard of in the contemporary world,” Georgy Kunadze, who served as Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation at the beginning of the Yeltsin period, says. “It is impossible to satisfy them,” he continues […]
Staunton, September 16 – In the wake of the Russian-organized elections, the Russian occupation authorities raided the offices of the Crimean Tatar Milli Mejlis and those of the Crimean Tatar newspaper Avdet, the latest indication that Moscow plans to suppress any and all independent Crimean Tatar activity on the Ukrainian peninsula. This latest manifestation of lawlessness […]
Staunton, September 16 – As part of his push to reduce the number of federal subjects in the Russian Federation by amalgamating smaller non-Russian districts with larger and predominantly ethnic Russian regions, Vladimir Putin orchestrated a referendum to unite Dolgan-Nenetsk Autonomous Region and the Evenk Autonomous Region with Krasnoyarsk Krai. But the forced marriage of […]
