Staunton, January 13 – The continuing dominance of an imperial mentality among Russians and their failure to consolidate as a nation reflects the fact that the Russian state became an empire before the Russian people came together as a nation, according to Yevgeny Anisimov, a scholar at the St. Petersburg Institute of History. In a […]
Staunton, January 18 – Even as some in the West are thinking about how to rebuild their relationships with Moscow, Yevgeny Savostyanov, the former head of the Moscow FSB, says that what Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine will have a far deeper, longer-lasting and more negative impact on relations between Russia and the West. […]
Staunton, January 7 – Ukrainians and others increasingly recognize that Russia will change its approach to Ukraine only when Russia itself changes, a conclusion that has led many to consider how Russia might change and reflect on what Ukraine must do until its eastern neighbor has become very different from what it is today. Unfortunately, […]
Staunton, January 7 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s very public invocation of religion and his tight embrace of Patriarch Kirill, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has fallen over the last year, the result of government policies which could be called “covert secularization” and the spread of the notion of “Orthodox atheism,” according to Boris […]
Staunton, January 7 – During 2014, “Cyborg” was used more often in the Ukrainian portion of the Internet than any other word, including some like “annexation” and “war” which might have been expected to take the lead, according to a study conducted by Mislovo, the online dictionary of contemporary Ukrainian usage. This slang term for […]
Staunton, January 15 – Many in Russia and the West are celebrating Yevgeny Primakov’s argument presented at the Mercury Club this week that hyper-centralization, a policy associated with Vladimir Putin, is a threat to the Russian Federation and its economic recovery and his call for devolving more powers to the regions of the country. But […]
Staunton, January 15 – The Russian ministry of culture has prepared a draft decree that would ban the showing of any film that its officials viewed as denigrating the country’s national culture, threatening its national unity and undermining the foundations of the constitutional system. The decree was supposed to enter into force today, but news […]
Staunton, January 15 – Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, commenting on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, says that “we will never accept the change of borders by force. Neither now nor in this century nor in this millennium.” But she adds that there should not be any limitson political dialogue with Moscow concerning the […]
Staunton, January 12 – Some activists among Russia’s numerically small peoples of the North would like to open casinos on their territories in the hopes that such facilities would provide them with jobs and money of the kind that some of the native peoples of America have obtained by doing so. On the one hand, […]
Staunton, January 12 – Kaliningrad — or Königsberg as it was historically called and is known to many of its residents — because of its geographic situation as an exclave and the current economic and political situation “simply cries out for the need for separation from [Moscow], for independence and the setting up of a […]
