Staunton, May 11 – “The criminal actions of Putin’s spetsnaz forces in Ukraine” are modelled on the actions of Stalin’s special force in Ukraine during World War II,” says Gennady Poberezhny in a review of a 2012 Russian study of “Stalin’s Commandos” and their operations against Ukrainian partisan forces. Yesterday, Andrey Illarionov posted a review […]
Staunton, May 10 – Russia has a military sufficient for some tasks, the head of the veterans organization in Naberezhny Chelny says, but it “cannot respond to the pressure which the NATO countries led by the US are putting on us,” an assessment that runs very much counter to the bombastic statements coming out of […]
Staunton, May 10 – Speaking in Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea, President Vladimir Putin called on all countries “to respect the right of Russians to self-determination,” but he failed to note, Boris Vishnevsky points out, that there is no such right for peoples on the territory of the Russian Federation. In an Ekho Moskvy blog post […]
Staunton, May 10 – The Pew Research Center this week released the results of a poll it conducted in the Russian Federation concerning Russian attitudes toward the independence of any region or republic in that country. It found that 48 percent said they would support such actions if they reflected the popular will and that […]
Staunton, May 9 – A St. Petersburg activist has called for the establishment of a political party to represent the needs of the numerically smallest nations of the Russian Federation, a movement that he says should seek a quota system and other means to protect their rights and also to embrace ethnic Russians who live […]
Staunton, May 9 – Moscow commentators have been denouncing the West for launching “a new cold war” against Russia, and a large share of Western commentators have assumed that this is because the Russian leadership doesn’t want one. In fact, Moscow is desperate to have that the new-old paradigm be restored at least at the […]
Staunton, May 8 – Despite the declaration in the 1993 Constitution that the Russian Federation is a multi-national country, an expert at the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI) argues that in fact it is not that but rather a nation state of Russians with a few ethnic minorities. Ilya Anosov, the head of […]
Staunton, May 8 – Fascism is one of the most negative terms in any language and it is often employed as the ultimate expression of one’s hatred or disapproval of something, but fascism has some real characteristics. Consequently, it is possible to list them and the evaluate whether this or that leader or this or […]
Staunton, May 8 Failed states come in a variety of shapes and sizes, one of Russia’s leading regionalist writers says, but on at least one important dimension, the Russian Federation is an example of a failed state while Ukraine, despite all its problems and Russian attacks, is a remarkably successful one. In a commentary on […]
Staunton, May 7 – If anyone has any doubts about the breadth of Vladimir Putin’s intentions both geopolitically and politically, they should be put to rest by the conclusion of a Russian historian that Transdniestria is “the first liberated part of Novorossiya,” Putin’s term for what he sees as a new state spreading across Ukraine […]
