Staunton, September 5 – From the very first moments of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, “optimists” in Russia and the West have deceived themselves and others and helped set the stage for Putin to go further, a pattern that shows no signs of abating anytime soon, according to Vitaly Portnikov. On the Grani.ru portal, the […]
Staunton, September 4 – The sharpening clash between Russia and the West is not a new cold war because it does not have the ideological content that the earlier conflict did, Viktor Krasilshchikov says, but that does not mean that it is simply a contest between the national interests of the countries involved. Instead, the […]
Staunton, September 4 – A campaign by Chuvash language supporters to get businesses and other institutions to put up signs saying “Here We Speak Chuvash” is spreading across that Christian Turkic republic in the Middle Volga and has now inspired activists in the nearby Finno-Ugric Republic of Udmurtia to do the same. Last spring, members […]
Staunton, September 4 – Many Soviet and Western analysts treated the Soviet space as something which was more unified than in fact was the case and thus failed to predict that it would disintegrate as it did. And even now, many of them assume that “a common post-Soviet space” exists, but that is not the […]
Staunton, September 4 – In an action that recalls some of the worst behavior of Brezhnev’s times, the current Russian government has sent a Ukrainian officer it seized and illegally transferred to Russia for “forensic psychiatric evaluation” at Moscow’s Serbski Institute where Soviet-era dissidents were infamously treated for “sluggish schizophrenia.” That has prompted a group […]
Staunton, September 4 – On the same day that President Barack Obama used the most “forceful language against Russia” of any US leader since Ronald Reagan and made “the ultimate commitment” to defend NATO allies in Eastern Europe, Sergey Karaganov said that the confrontation between Russia and the West will go on for a very […]
Staunton, September 3 – While ethnic Russians form roughly the same share of the population of Siberia that they did 20 years ago, they form smaller fractions in five non-Russian territories there, the result of local growth and Russian flight, according to a new study of ethnic challenges to Moscow east of the Urals. In […]
Staunton, September 3 – Kiev’s failure to take into consideration the opinions of part of the residents of the Donbass is Moscow’s fault because the Russian government has “done everything in order to discredit real and civilized protest by putting in its place banditry and armed aggression,” according to Russian commentator Kseniya Kirillova. In a […]
Staunton, September 3 – Because of the failure of the Putin regime to develop the Russian Federation’s medical industry, thus forcing the country to purchase abroad up to 80 percent of its medicines, the Kremlin’s planned imposition of restrictions on their import will hurting the ill, a group to whose plight Moscow has long shown […]
Staunton, September 3 – Pskov Oblast, the region of the Russian Federation along that country’s borders with Estonia and Latvia, seldom attracts much attention from outsiders. It has been in the news lately because of the deaths of servicemen from there in Ukraine. But it merits attention as well because more than any other Russian […]
