Staunton, August 19 – An increasing number of Russians, horrified by what Vladimir Putin is doing and convinced that reforming his regime is impossible, are beginning to think about what will happen “after Putin.” In many cases these reflections are disturbing in the short term but provide a source of optimism over the longer haul. […]
Staunton, August 21 – Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko has named Mustafa Cemilev to the new position of plenipotentiary representative for Crimean Tatar affairs and charged him with “securing the observation of the constitutional rights of the Crimean Tatar people as an indigenous people of Ukraine.” Poroshenko’s decision institutionalizes the Verkhovna Rada’s vote on March 20 […]
Staunton, August 21 – Photographer Aleksandr Belensky has documented what many observers feared: despite spending more than 50 billion US dollars on the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin has left Sochi not the vital place he promised but a ghost town where there are almost no tourists and where much of the infrastructure is already decaying. […]
Staunton, August 10 – Ever more people around the world want Vladimir Putin to leave the scene but very few have asked themselves what Russia will be like after his departure. Someone who has is Sergei Klimovsky, he suggests that Russia will either be a fascist state even worse than the current regime or a […]
Staunton, August 18 – Yesterday, Russian police blocked the march in Novosibirsk calling for Moscow to live up to the constitution and observe the rights of the country’s federal subjects, but the Putin regime failed to block the message of the Siberian federalists from getting out. Not only did the actions of the police underscore […]
Staunton, August 18 – Unless it discriminates against non-Russian peoples on the basis of cultivating hatred against them, an empire like Russia remains cannot survive and will collapse, according to Ukrainian commentator Oleg Shro. And because that is the case, Russia today is best described so much as “the evil empire” but rather as “the […]
Staunton, August 17 – An instructor at the Russian foreign ministry’s training academy told participants at a government-sponsored youth camp that “Zionism is a movement for the establishment of the world rule of Jewish bankers,” that it “finances pagans to destroy Orthodoxy,” and that it has so “Judaicized” Catholicism that “almost nothing remains” of that […]
Staunton, August 17 – The pro-Russia faction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate succeeded in electing Metropolitan Onufriy to be its new head, but that victory is likely to be a Pyrrhic one both for the UOC MP, which will now lose even more of its parishes, and for Patriarch Kirill who will […]
Staunton, August 17 – Most Western commentators focus on the absence of genuine democracy in the so-called “hybrid” regimes but fail to notice that such regimes are also characterized by a lack of genuine dictatorship, according to Yekaterina Schulman, a Moscow legal affairs commentator. “It is easy to see that the democratic façade [of such […]
Staunton, August 14 – Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechens, says that the Russian armed services must resume drafting young Chechens to serve in their ranks. This appeal reflects his concerns about what not drafting them will mean for the future of his republic and region and calls into question recent Moscow claims that it […]
