Window on Eurasia

Staunton, April 25 – As he does each Sunday, Dmitry Bukovsky of Kyiv’s “Delovaya stolitsa” chooses from among the flood of Russian coverage about Ukraine “the top 5 propagandistic myths, fakes and stupidities” the Kremlin has committed over the course of the previous week (dsnews.ua/politics/top-5-propagandistskih-mifov-feykov-i-glupostey-kremlya-26042015110000). His selection for the past seven days includes the following: […]

Staunton, April 25 -Viktor Kadochnikov, a Russian blogger, poses 20 questions that he suggests those who support Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine should be asking themselves. If they do and if they are honest, they won’t be able to support the Kremlin leader’s policies any more. Below, in summary form, are the 20 questions he […]

Staunton, April 24 – Perhaps the most searing self-indictment of those who watch the onset of totalitarianism but do not protest — because they remain convinced that only someone else will be its targets and its victims — was offered in 1946 by German Protestant Pastor Martin Niemöller. Speaking in the rubble of the defeated […]

Staunton, April 24 – Andrey Piontkovsky, who in the past has warned that Vladimir Putin will continue to escalate his acts of aggression, now says that there is unlikely to be any massive Russian attack on Ukraine because “even Putin understands that such an adventure would be catastrophic for his personal power.” Of course, the […]

Staunton, April 24 “Russia looks in a mirror and sees the USSR and thinks that all those around it see it that way, tries to conduct itself as the USSR did and considers the threats which the Soviet Union did,” Pavel Kazarin says. “But the West looks at Russia as Russia, wants a return to […]

Staunton, April 24 – Many Russians make a clear distinction between “russky,” the Russian adjective for a member of the Russian ethnos, and “rossiyanin,” a noun designating anyone who is a subject of citizen of the Russian state. And many Russian nationalists dislike the former precisely because they say it demeans their ethno-national identity. But […]

Staunton, April 24 – Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s has made a statement that his forces should attack anyone, “Muscovite or Stavropol resident,” who might appear on the territory of the republic, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has suggested that the Islamic State is Russia’s main enemy may presage the opening of a third post-Soviet […]

Staunton, April 22 — Because of the nature of the conflict in Ukraine and the kind of people who have gone to fight there, Donbas veterans suffer from a special “Donbas syndrome” and constitute a bigger threat to themselves and to society when they return to Russia than did the veterans of the Afghan and […]

Staunton, April 22 – Four years ago, liberal Russians began to refer to the hurrah-patriots who opposed them as vatniki or “vatniks,” a reference to the padded jackets such people often wore but used to designate their slavish support of the Kremlin and their hostility to the West and civilization. But now, Pavel Shekhtman suggests, […]