Staunton, September 3 – US President Barack Obama’s visit to Tallinn today comes almost exactly 75 years after the United States and the three Baltic countries formed one of the most remarkable alliances of the 20th century. (An Estonian translation of this article appeared in Tallinn’s Eesti Paevaleht.) That alliance, which for nearly 50 years took […]
Staunton, September 2 – With the Crimean Anschluss, a new “cultural type” has emerged, “Homo Crimeacus,” people who think “fundamentally differently than “’post-communist’ Russians” and who are pursuing a doomed effort to restore the “Homo Sovieticus” of the late USSR, according to Vladimir Pastukhov. In an essay posted on Polit.ru today, the St. Antony’s scholar […]
Staunton, September 2 – Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has “unexpectedly” allowed Tatarstan to retain its presidency and thus “again confirm its status as a special region within Russia, ‘an exception from the rules,’ as former Federal Council speaker Sergey Mironov put it, and thus, “a bastion of federalism” within Russia, according to a Muslim […]
Staunton, August 31 – Seventy-three years after their republic was disbanded by Stalin and 24 years after the two Germanies were reunited, some of Russia’s remaining Germans have been inspired by the creation of a Crimean Republic within the Russian Federation to increase their efforts to restore a German Republic within Russia. Given the radical […]
Staunton, August 31 – A man from the Belarusian city of Bobruisk has filed suit in a Moscow court against three Russian news agencies seeking compensation for their use of the word ‘Belorussiya’ instead of ‘Belarus’ as the name of his country, something he says has damaged his honor and dignity. “I am a citizen […]
Staunton, August 31 – The organizing committee of the Russian Anti-War Movement says that “Russian stands at the brink of catastrophe.” Following Putin’s introduction of regular Russian army units into Ukraine, an action that threatens losses equivalent to the war in Afghanistan, a major military conflict in Europe, and a fratricidal war. Arguing that Vladimir […]
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s gutting of Tatarstan’s 1990 sovereignty declaration has cost every resident of that Middle Volga republic not only his or her rights and dignity but also has meant that some 70,000 US dollars earned from the sale of Tatarstan’s natural resources that should have gone to each of them has […]
Staunton, August 30 – Speaking in at the Seliger youth forum yesterday, Vladimir Putin said that today, as during World War I, there are people inside Russia who are seeking its defeat, a resuscitation of Adolf Hitler’s “stab in the back” theory about why his country lost that conflict and the basis for his attacks […]
Staunton, September 2 – Russians are less enthralled about the annexation of Crimea than they were a few months ago, according to a Levada Center poll, an apparent result of information fatigue and growing recognition of the costs involved but a trend that appears to have prompted the Kremlin to organize druzhinniki to combat opposition […]
Staunton, September 1 – “Crimea never was pro-Russian – it did not know and could not know post-Soviet Russia,” Pavel Kazarin says. “Instead, over the course of the last quarter of a century,” the Ukrainian peninsula was “pro-Soviet,” something that is going to create problems for Moscow there in the near term. That confusion is […]
