Window on Eurasia

Staunton, June 16 – Transbaikal officials are working on a deal with China that would allow Chinese firms to rent more than 300,000 acres of land in that Russian region, but a Beijing official says that the deal won’t go through unless Moscow agrees to a massive influx of Chinese workers because there are no […]

Staunton, June 17 – Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine’s Donbas has left many Ukrainian Baptist communities in a difficult state because the occupation authorities do not want to recognize them unless they break their ties with Kyiv and subordinate themselves to Moscow. But it has also, says Igor Bandura, the vice president […]

Staunton, June 15 – Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov has challenged Moscow in many ways, but now it has taken on a new one. The center has discouraged the non-Russian republics from promoting the survival and use of their titular languages outside their borders. But now Chechnya is doing just that – and adding insult to […]

Staunton, June 16 – The war in Ukraine is changing the nuclear balance in the world in three ways: it is leading Russia and the US to slow their cutbacks in the number of war heads, it is causing countries thinking about giving up their nuclear aspirations to revisit the situation, and it is allowing […]

Staunton, June 15 – Today, Dmitry Bukovsky of Kyiv’s Delovaya Stolitsa provides a particularly rich harvest of the Kremlin’s “top propaganda myths, fakes and stupidities” of the last week, a collection that simultaneously shows how duplicitous and foolish Moscow commentaries are and how skeptical everyone should be about them. The five are the following: 1. […]

Staunton, June 15 – That Vladimir Putin lives in a different reality than do other world leaders is now more or less common ground. Now, two commentators have described respectively what the Kremlin leader dreams about and what his worst nightmare might turn out to be. In a commentary in Kyiv’s Novoye Vremya, Yury Felshtinsky, […]

Staunton, June 14 – Seventy-five years ago today, the Soviet Union began to occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, act the West never recognized as legitimate but that lasted until 1991. Despite the distance in time from those events, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite says that the Baltic peoples must remain vigilant with regard to the Russian […]

Staunton, June 14 – “Reconciliation is a good thing, and hostility is bad,” Igor Klyamkin says. “But there are reconciliations and reconciliations,” some of which open a path to a better future and others of which point to the return of the evils of the past. Unfortunately, the one on offer in Russia today is […]

Staunton, June 13 – The toughening of the West’s position on Ukraine very much in evidence at the G7 meeting reflects the fact that Vladimir Putin has fundamentally misread the situation and not taken advantage of the face-saving measures which the West had been offering him, according to Vitaly Portnikov. The Kremlin leader “sincerely believed […]

Staunton, June 12 – Not satisfied with the three-year moratorium imposed by St. Petersburg governor Georgy Poltavchenko on changing street and other place names in the northern capital, the city’s legislative assembly is preparing a law that would permanently ban any such changes, including the replacement of Soviet-era names with tsarist-era ones. Boris Vishnevsky, one […]