Staunton, December 6 – Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite says that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin until the Kremlin leader changes his course, and that she does not see any need for that given the multiple channels that Western countries have for interacting with the Russian government. To deal with […]
Staunton, December 8 – The decisions by high profile Russians to go into exile because of what is happening to their country under Vladimir Putin continue to attract media attention in Moscow and the West, but such coverage often has the effect of obscuring rather than highlighting the dimensions of this term. Last week, for […]
Staunton, December 9 – The Chuvash, a Christian Turkic nation which has its own republic in the Middle Volga, are, by virtue of their activism on behalf of their own language and culture, becoming the bridge between the Turkic nations like the Tatars and Bashkirs and the Finno-Ugric peoples like the Mari. They have traditionally […]
Staunton, December 9 – Because of declining demand and profitability, Russian Railways says it will suspend passenger train routes beginning on December 14th between the Russian Federation, on the one hand, and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, on the other, but it is not blocking any trains from these countries to Russia. But a spokesman […]
Staunton, December 9 – The Munich Agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, as some have forgotten, was a compromise between what the Nazi leader wanted and the status quo that the British wanted to protect in order to reduce tensions in Europe and achieve, in Chamberlain’s infamous words, “peace in our time.” According to […]
Staunton, December 8 – Vladimir Putin says he is concerned about “the defense and development of linguistic culture,” but he is advancing policies that threaten the future of the non-Russian languages of the country even more than they were hurt by the Russianizing and Russifying policies of the Soviet government. Not only are he and […]
Staunton, December 8 – Reflecting Moscow’s difficulties in finding enough men to serve in the military because of Russia’s demographic decline, difficulties exacerbated by Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, commanders are exploiting the ignorance of many draftees and forcing them to agree to sign on for longer terms of service as “professional soldiers.” This violation […]
Staunton, December 8 – Vladimir Putin’s declaration to visiting French President Francois Hollande that he supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine is just as hypocritical and fraudulent as his past remarks about the country he has subverted and invaded. In fact, he supports this idea in exactly the same way that a rope “supports” a […]
Staunton, December 6 – Moscow must restore the term “enemy of the people” as a criminal charge in order to defend Russia against the information war that has been unleashed against it by the West, according to Ilya Belous, a Yekaterinburg blogger and “patriotic” — that is, pro-Putin — activist. Speaking to a session of […]
Staunton, December 6 – The violence in Chechnya this week has led many Russian and Western commentators to suggest that the unrest there is about to spread to other parts of the North Caucasus, but such analyses are wrong: unrest throughout the region has been there all along. It has only been exacerbated in recent […]
