Staunton, May 5 – Commentators have long celebrated the fact that the USSR broke up with little violence in 1991 – the conflicts in Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria and Chechnya typically have been treated as exceptions that prove the rule. But now, many of the unresolved issues from 23 years ago are leading to violence […]
Staunton, May 5 – By annexing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, Moscow appears more likely to have acquired “a second Dagestan,” the most unstable republic in the North Caucasus, than “a second Tatarstan,” the stable, wealthy and influential republic in the Middle Volga, according to Russian experts. In a survey of the parallels between Crimea and Dagestan […]
Staunton, May 5 – Ostensibly at the insistence of parental demands and despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that there are three official languages on the peninsula, Russian is replacing Ukrainian as the language of instruction in schools there, according to a report in Izvestiya today. The Moscow paper says that parents in Sevastopol, Simferopol, […]
Staunton, May 5 – Despite his promotion of himself as “the ingatherer of the Russian lands” and “the defender of ethnic Russians” wherever they live, Vladimir Putin has failed to live up to his frequent promises to help the 100,000 ethnic Russians who fled Chechnya during the conflict and have not been able to return, […]
Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards our costs. An interactive map of the situation: View Ukraine: April, 2014 in a larger map For links to individual […]
Pro-Russian separatists have once again taken control of the Trade Union building in Odessa, and there are clashes once again. Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information service by making a donation towards […]
Staunton, May 4 – Because Vladimir Putin did not stop after the Crimean Anschluss, the Kremlin leader now faces a Hobson’s choice of his own making: if he expands his aggression in Ukraine, he will face a Ukrainian people in arms backed by the West, but if he does not introduce forces there, he will […]
Kharkiv, Ukraine — “The last few months have divided friends and families,” says Olga Filippova, a 47-year-old social scientist and long time Kharkiv resident, “I can’t even talk to my relative [who lives in Russia] about politics, because she would rather believe the news than me. We’ve agreed to only talk about family, but that […]
Staunton, May 4 – Had Vladimir Putin accepted the Maidan’s ouster of discredited Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and agreed to accept the results of the upcoming elections, nothing that has occurred in Ukraine since that time would have happened, according to a Ukrainian commentator. “Thousands of people would not have suddenly discovered in themselves an […]
Kiev, Ukraine — On May 1, Ukraine’s acting president Turchynov admitted that it lost control of eastern Ukraine. The following day, on May 2, the government launched a military offensive to take back eastern cities from militants. In Slavyansk, two military helicopters were shot down, allegedly by the pro-Russian forces. In Odessa, the death toll […]
