Staunton, March 28 — Speaking in Kyiv March 27, Russian opposition leader Garri Kasparov said that the collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime could spark the disintegration of the Russian Federation and that that in turn would likely be far more dangerous and explosive than was the end of the USSR. Kasparov said it is impossible […]
Staunton, March 26 — Ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Far East, the descendants of Ukrainians who moved there voluntarily in late tsarist times and forcibly in Soviet ones, are being harassed by Russians there for their support of Ukraine, even as Russians in Crimea are threatening the Crimean Tatars with deportation to that faraway region. […]
Staunton, March 26 — It is clear that Vladimir Putin has gone further in his confrontation with the West than many of those around him would prefer; but just as was the case with Adolf Hitler, they will threaten to oust him only when he begins to suffer defeat and his regime is at the […]
Staunton, March 24 – Whenever people are confronted by changes that call into question existing paradigms, their first reaction typically is to deny that anything has happened or that it is significant, but their second is to seek analogies and parallels in the past as guides to understanding. In recent weeks, the murder of Boris […]
Staunton, March 24 – Even though the Russian government currently repairs less than one percent of its horrific roads in many regions, Moscow has announced plans to build a superhighway and rail line extending across the Russian north to the Bering Straits and a tunnel to Alaska, a project in which enormous sums will be […]
Staunton, March 25 – Positive developments with regard to radical extremist Russian nationalists during 2014 – including a falloff in the number of attacks on immigrants – were not the result of state policy but rather the refocusing of the attention of such people on events in Ukraine, according to SOVA’s annual report on such […]
Staunton, March 26 – In Vedomosti today, two scholars based in Paris and Los Angeles say that the new crop of dictators in the world today get by with a minimum use of force even at times of “moderate economic difficulties” and prefer to maintain their power by “an intensification of censorship and propaganda. Russia’s […]
Staunton, March 26 – Vladimir Putin is “not Yeltsin’s successor but Stalin’s,” and Sergey Lavrov is the successor of Stalin’s commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, Slava Rabinovich argues. Consequently, the world must “begin the difficult but necessary process of excluding Russia from the UN Security Council” just as the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. […]
Staunton, March 25 – Moscow is beginning to recognize that it cannot control Islam in Russia via its preferred method of creating a single hierarchical structure, Aleksey Malashenko says. Islam in Russia like Islam in the world at large is simply too diverse for such a structure to work. For the past two decades, leaders […]
Staunton, March 23 — Many people around world have been focusing on and been horrified by the meeting of representatives of extreme right, even fascist parties in St. Petersburg over the weekend, but fewer have paid attention to another aspect of Moscow’s outreach — to separatists around the world whose efforts may help Vladimir Putin […]
