After yesterday’s violence in Donetsk and the shooting of Kharkiv Mayor Gennady Kernes, the situation is extremely volatile in south-east Ukraine today. The European Union and Canada have followed the United States in announcing new waves of sanctions against Russian and Ukrainian officials involved in both the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of south-east […]
Staunton, April 28 – Many Russians believe and many in the West accept the notion that Ukrainians and Belarusians are offshoots of the formation and growth of the Russian nation, a reflection of a sometimes innocent confusion between nation building and state building but often as now the result of Kremlin efforts to rewrite history […]
Staunton, April 28 – Many in Russia and the West have speculated that the combination of Vladimir Putin’s policies against Ukraine, Moscow’s increasing isolation internationally, and deteriorating economic conditions at home will eventually lead to a Maidan-style challenge to his rule. That is possible, of course, but a man identified as a former FSB officer […]
Staunton, April 28 – Vladimir Putin’s moves against Ukraine are part of his larger plan not only to restore a country with the borders of the USSR but also to re-establish Moscow’s dominance in Eastern Europe and in Asia, according to Vitaly Portnikov in a comment to Gordunua.com. Putin clearly wants to occupy “all of […]
Staunton, April 27 – One of the darkest pages in Soviet and indeed Russian history was the anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin unleashed against everything Western in 1949, a campaign that ultimately focused on the Jews whom the Soviet dictator was planning to deport beyond the Urals at the time of his death. Even those who remain […]
Staunton, April 27 – One of the dangers that events like Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and continuing subversion of Ukraine poses is that these events inevitably mean that many observers and governments do not attend to other moves the Russian government is making, moves that one could almost describe as taking place under the cover […]
Staunton, April 27 – When an individual, a leader or a country takes something personally rather than viewing it as being in the way of business, that makes the situation far more dangerous because the usual options others have for countering actions taken on the basis of hard-headed calculation fall away. Still worse, such shifts […]
Staunton, April 26 – The worsening of relations between the US and the Russian Federation because of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine has led some in the Russian Federation to demonize Americans and all things American, including calls to boycott McDonald’s restaurants and to not drink Coca-Cola. There have been some exceptions to this trend but […]
Staunton, April 26 – Tatar organizations in the Middle Volga have nominated Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement, for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step that calls attention to Cemilev’s efforts to defend his land against Russian aggression and growing ties between the Tatars of Crimea and the Tatars of […]
Staunton, April 26 – There is an old Soviet joke that the West sends diplomats to Moscow and Moscow treats them like spies while Moscow dispatches spies to Western capitals and Western governments treat them like diplomats, a joke that had more than a little basis in fact and that resonates now because of what […]
