Window on Eurasia

Staunton, April 14 – Vladimir Putin believes that he can dominate the Baltic countries and destroy NATO not by a direct invasion which the Western alliance is prepared to counter but rather by threatening to use nuclear weapons against them and the Europeans, something that would lead the West not to come to their aid, […]

Staunton, April 13 – Statements by Russian security officials and actions by siloviki [law-enforcers] including declaring a new counter-terrorism operation against an area of 4,500 square kilometers with some 368,000 people show that Dagestan has become “the northern front” of the Islamic State, according to Anton Bredikhin. In a study on the Kavkazoved portal, the […]

Staunton, April 13 – Karelian activists say that the recent suggestion by Russian National Security Council chief Nikolay Patrushev that Finnish “revanchism” is behind the upsurge in popular anger and activism in Karelia is absurd and that the real cause lies in Moscow’s heavy-handed Russification policy as carried out by incumbent republic head Aleksandr Khudilaynen. […]

Staunton, April 12 – Russians laugh at any suggestion that the Ukrainian people came out to the Maidan to make history and insist that they were driven there by American political technologists, a reflection of the fundamental contrast between their country and that of the Ukrainians, Russian political analyst Andrei Okara says. That contrast – […]

Staunton, April 12 – Writing in Warsaw’s Gazeta Wyborcza a week ago, Wacław Radziwinowicz argued that Moscow’s victory in World War II has become “the new civic religion” in Russia, a suggestion that has provoked a strong negative reaction in that country with many Russians saying that the Polish journalist had insulted their national history. […]

Staunton, April 12 – Moscow’s new five-year plan for promoting patriotism among the young is not only better financed – spending will more than double – but far more militaristic than the program it replaces and than the Soviet-era projects in this sphere, according to an analysis by Anton Chablin, a commentator for Kavkazskaya Politika. […]

Staunton, April 12 – According to the Russian Interior Ministry, 1.15 million Muscovites – approximately ten percent of the Russian capital’s population — attended Easter services today. According to the Russian Orthodox Church, the actual figure was 1.5 million. But both agreed that the number this year, a record, is far higher than it was […]

Staunton, April 10 – A great deal of attention has been given to Chechens, Buryats and other non-Russians going to the Donbass to fight for the pro-Moscow “peoples republics” there, a flow that Russian propagandists have played up as evidence that support for Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” is broader than just among ethnic Russians. But […]

Staunton, April 10 – Russian national culture is not the determinant of the country’s development that many now believe it to be, according to Emil Pain, a leading Moscow expert on ethnicity and culture. Instead, it may “shade” this or that political or economic arrangements found in a variety of places. At a Liberal Mission […]

Staunton, April 11 – Every year in the spring, groups of Muslims at the behest of the Council of Muftis of Russia (SMR) and the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Moscow visit the Muslim sections of the major cemeteries of the Russian capital to make sure that all is in order with the graves of […]