Staunton, April 11 – Moscow’s proposals to create a Russian foreign legion and to allow Tajikistan citizens to serve in the ranks of the Russian Army are “extremely timely” ideas, according to Shomurod Madamin. “Russians don’t want to serve in their own army,” but Tajiks have few good options and service in Russian ranks is […]
Staunton, April 11 – Pro-Putin activists have redirected their fire from people in Sverdlovsk Region who are opposed to the war in Ukraine to faculty and staff of the Urals Federal University who they accuse of transforming that institution into “’a center for the preparation of color revolutions,’” according to Kseniya Kirillova. Just as at […]
Staunton, April 11 -“The further ideology spreads through the country, the weaker the institution of political leadership becomes,” according to Tatyana Stanovaya, who argues that “first the leader becomes dependent on ideological positions, then the personality factor dissolves and finally it becomes unimportant for the system who stands at the head.” Consequently, the senior analyst […]
Staunton, April 11 – Moscow can’t afford having the Donbass become a frozen conflict with an unrecognized state like Transnistria or Nagorno-Karabakh: its economy cannot exist independently and its population is far beyond the capacity of the Russian state to subsidize for very long, according to Pavel Felgengauer. The implications of the Moscow military analyst’s […]
Staunton, April 9 – Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a close aide to Patriarch Kirill and the head of the Synod’s Department for Relations between the Church and Society, is pushing the notion of a popular or even socialist monarchy as the most appropriate form of government for Russia, an idea that has its roots in the […]
Staunton, April 10 – “The mental gap between Ukraine and Russia is growing, and the trajectories of the two country are ever more strongly diverging,” according to Maksim Artemyev in an assessment of new Ukrainian laws opening Soviet-era secret police archives, de-Sovietizing the country’s toponymy, and revising key judgments about the past. In a comment […]
Staunton, April 10 -It is a measure of how Moscow has tightened the screws on the media that Russia will “soon become a country in which there will be more blocked websites than working ones,” according to Svetlana Kuzevanova, a legal specialist at the Voronezh Center for the Defense of Media Rights. In an interview […]
Staunton, April 10 – Faced with superior NATO forces in the larger Baltic Sea region and the threat they pose in the first instance to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Leonid Nersisyan, military observer for the Regnum news agency, says that Moscow is prepared to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers which now oppose it. […]
Staunton, April 9 – Vladimir Putin’s goal in Ukraine remains regime change in Kyiv, something he had hoped his intervention in Crimea and Donbass would force the Ukrainians to do on their own. But that hasn’t happened, and now, the Kremlin leader is likely to launch a broader attack against Ukraine in the near future, […]
Staunton, April 7 – Russians want their government to take care of them and ensure a high standard of living, surveys routinely show, but they “do not believe in the possibility of influencing the institutions of power by civilized means” and thus are not inclined to try to hold the regime responsible, according to Sergey […]
