Staunton, December 25 – It is a fool’s errand to try to document and then denounce all the lies the Russian government and media have committed over the last year about Ukraine: Each day brings a fresh crop. But some are so egregious, so dangerous to the international system, and so likely to become precedents […]
Staunton, December 25 – In his Christmas message, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of the 1.5 million Roman Catholics in Belarus, called on the faithful not to be afraid of the current situation, echoing the words of the late Pope John Paul II to Poles at the beginning of his pontificate. Shortly after his election […]
Staunton, December 22 – Vladimir Putin has agreed with proposals by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to require the heads of the federal subjects to bear responsibility for mobilization and fighting against diversionary forces, a step that makes them into something like tsarist-era governors general and could presage a new territorial delimitation of the country. At […]
Staunton, December 22 – Russians living in the largest cities, the people who benefited the most from the oil-driven boom of the last decade, now feel the greatest concern about the impact on their lives of the economic crisis because they are better informed than those in smaller ones and rural areas, a pattern that […]
Staunton, December 22 — Belarusian nationalists over the last year “not only have come out of ‘the political ghetto’ into which they have been since the end of the 1990s but also have become an influential political force” in Minsk, indeed a force that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka has had to take into consideration and play […]
Staunton, December 23 – Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov says that “traitors in the Kremlin, government and other power structures,” people who do not carry out the decisions of President Vladimir Putin, must be purged from office in order to improve the economy and block Western efforts to destabilize Russia. In an interview published in Izvestia yesterday, […]
Staunton, December 20 – Twenty times during his press conference, Vladimir Putin said that he supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine, simultaneously the latest example of his dishonesty and duplicity, his efforts to win support from the West for a settlement in his favor, and his desire to exploit a pro-Moscow minority inside Ukraine to […]
Staunton, December 20 – The collapse of the ruble and the test of Russian language knowledge they will soon be required to take are prompting labor migrants in the Russian Federation to leave in massive numbers, with the leader of the Federation of Migrants now predicting that more than a quarter of them will depart […]
Staunton, December 20 – In the minds of some, Vladimir Putin used his press conference December 18 to demonstrate his conviction that he will remain president of Russia forever, ever more Russian commentators are asking “What will be the situation after Putin?” Among those doing so is Daniil Kotsyubinsky, a historian and journalist, who gave […]
Staunton, December 20 – Thirty percent of Russians, nearly one in three, say that they would like their children or grandchildren to serve in the security organs with almost two-thirds of those (62 percent) saying that this would guarantee them status and respect from the rest of society, according to a Russian Public Opinion Research […]
