Staunton, July 24 – Although Russians now say they support Vladimir Putin’s assertive foreign policy, their attitude may change if Moscow introduces new taxes and improving its tax collection program, efforts that experts say will lead to a decline in their standard of living and an increase in the size of the country’s shadow economy. […]
Staunton, July 27 – In a Facebook post that has been picked up by various Armenian outlets, Tigran Khemalyan, a noted filmmaker, sharply criticizes those ethnic Armenians who have become more Russian than the patriarch and who are promoting Russian great power attitudes of hostility and suspicion to everything non-Russian. Among these “’prophets’ of Russism,” […]
Staunton, July 27 – Residents of the Russian Federation are increasingly identifying not as Russians but as Siberians not only because they feel themselves different than ethnic Russians in terms of mentality but also because Moscow treats them like a colony and because they have closer ties to China and the Pacific Rim countries than […]
Staunton, July 27 – Having taken the measure of the West and found it wanting, Vladimir Putin has expanded his aggression from the military occupation of Crimea to the organization of irredentist insurgencies in eastern Ukraine to the shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner to the shelling of Ukrainian targets from the territory of the […]
Staunton, July 22 – In a commentary titled “Forewarned and Armed,” Ilya Milshtein argues that tragically “there are no particular reasons to hope that Putin will change his approach” in Ukraine. Instead, the Moscow analyst says, he will proceed in ways that reflect his beliefs in his own exceptionalism and in his ability to intimidate […]
Staunton, July 22 – More than two out of every three Dagestani men between the ages of 20 and 24 living in rural areas of that North Caucasus republic are unemployed, a situation that is leading to their radicalization and providing new recruits for both anti-Russian militants and the criminal world, according to official data […]
Staunton, July 21 – A century ago, Russians cheered the entrance of their country into World War I, but the country wasn’t prepared and as a result, it suffered military defeat, social and political revolutions, and a brutal civil war. Tragically, Maksim Kalashnikov says, the parallels between 1914 and now are all too obvious. The […]
Staunton, July 21 – “Many ethnic Russians both in Ukraine and in Russia itself are ready to declare themselves Ukrainians” or indeed anything else “if only to break out of ‘the Russian world’ and ‘cursed Sovietism’ and gain access to Western civilization and the benefits they believe it offers, according to a Russian Marxist. In […]
Staunton, July 21 – Mikhail Degtaryev, a Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Republic of Russia (LDPR), is preparing legislation to replace the current administrative-territorial division of the Russian Federation in regions, territories and republics with the tsarist-era one of provinces (guberniya) and districts (uezd), an action he says would restore “historical justice” and end […]
Staunton, July 21 – Russian officials have often argued that the amount of government support for the titular nationalities of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation should reflect their share of the population rather than the fact that these republics are the national homes of those nations. But in fact, a Muslim commentator says, […]
