Staunton, August 27 – While Russia’s involvement in the fighting in southeastern Ukraine has been obvious for a long time, Moscow’s decision to send regular military units, and even more the loss of life of soldiers who were only following orders, is transforming the conflict there for ordinary Russians, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin. Moscow took […]
Staunton, August 25 – The more the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church [ROC MP] supports Russian aggression in Ukraine, “the fewer chances this church will have for a future not only in Ukraine but also in Russia and in the entire world,” according to Yuri Chernomorets. The Kiev commentator notes that Patriarch Kirill […]
Staunton, August 25 – The flow of ethnic Russian refugees from Ukraine is giving Russia “a truly historical opportunity to restore the ethnic balance in the North Caucasus Federal District” by reversing the decline in the share of the Slavic population there over recent years and thus defending Russia against the Muslim south, according to […]
Staunton, August 26 – Russian government media outlets pushed demands for the federalization of Ukraine after the Kremlin indicated that was what Vladimir Putin wanted and then almost as quickly toned down its promotion of that idea apparently after it began to resonate in the regions of the Russian Federation itself. At the request of […]
Staunton, August 26 – The leaders of major Western countries declare that they are seeking to find an answer to the crisis in Ukraine, but in order to find an answer, it is important that they begin to ask the right questions. It is all too clear that many of them are not doing so […]
Staunton, August 26 – If Kazakhs demand that their national language takes precedence over all others in all situations in that Central Asian country, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev warned in a television interview this week, they risk seeing their country suffer as Ukraine now is. If Kazakhstan were to “ban all languages except Kazakh,” he said, […]
Staunton, August 26 – A new documentary film, “Unnoticed Heroes of a Not Well-Known War,” released in Moscow as part of Days of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, calls attention to one aspect of that conflict few know about: ten percent of the Russian subjects mobilized to fight in World War I, some 1.5 […]
Staunton, August 26 – Independent Russian experts say that there is no basis for the claim by Boris Titov, presidential plenipotentiary for the rights of entrepreneurs, that the level of corruption in the Russian Federation has fallen. Instead, they say, all measures point to corruption still being a major obstacle for the country’s economic development. […]
Staunton, August 24 – Unlike some Western leaders who suggested that the leaders of the August 1991 coup in Moscow included reformists on the model of Mikhail Gorbachev, Stanislav Shushkevich, then deputy chairman of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet and later president of Belarus, understood instantly that they were committed to “the revival of the old […]
Staunton, August 24 – Stalin made “an error” in annexing Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact because what Moscow needed with war on the horizon was “the establishment of buffer states on the border of the USSR and not their being pulled into the Union itself,” with all the border changes that […]
