Staunton, July 15 – Andrey Neronsky, the director of the Moscow Center of Russian Culture in Latvia, says that a Ukrainian scenario is completely possible in that Baltic country and that as few as 500 pro-Russian militants like those in Donetsk and Luhansk could end Latvia’s existence as a unified state. In comments to Newsbalt.ru […]
Staunton, July 14 – The Ukrainian government lacks the resources to recover Crimea, according to a Moscow military analyst, and could do so only if Russia were to “weaken to the point that it simply could not defend” the peninsula. Otherwise, talk about “the return of Crimea to Ukraine” is, in his words, “something fantastic.” […]
Staunton, July 14 – Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as a defender of conservative values and won enormous support from many in Russia and the West who identify as conservatives, but Putin’s conservatism and the conservatism found in the West are two very different things, according to Ilya Shablinsky, a specialist on constitutional law. In […]
Staunton, July 14 – Many Russians and even more people in the West view the series of laws the Duma has passed over the last year banning one or another activity as an embarrassment for Moscow, but in fact, these bans work to the benefit of Vladimir Putin and his regime, according to Stanislav Belkovsky. […]
Staunton, July 13 – Despite the trappings of modernity, Russia is rapidly moving toward an obscurantist medievalism much Afghanistan under the Taliban and Iran under the ayatollahs and equally and even more disturbingly much like Germany under the Third Reich, according to Aleksandr Asmolov, a psychologist at Moscow State University. “Today,” he told Dozhd television’s […]
Staunton, July 13 – The premature death of Valeriya Novodvorskaya at 64 has brought an outpouring of regret about the passing of rights activist and commentator. But Aleksandr Skobov, who has a biography in many respects paralleling hers but who often disagreed with her, has called attention to one aspect of our collective loss that […]
Staunton, July 13 – In the summer of 1942, during the height of fighting on the eastern front, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg issued a series of attacks on German soldiers that mirror imaged Nazi propaganda, describing German soldiers as less than human and calling on Soviet citizens to kill them wherever and whenever they found […]
Staunton, July 13 – For most of the last six months, the Moscow media have talked about little else than Ukraine, thus shifting the concerns of many Russians away from the issue of immigration from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Now, those same outlets are again focusing on immigrants as a threat. On the one […]
Staunton, July 11 – After a period in which most new anecdotes about Vladimir Putin, arose on the Internet, they are now appearing in Russian streets, a shift that is changing their form and possibly their impact, according to one of the co-authors of Anecdotes about Stalin: Texts, Commentaries and Investigations. In an interview published […]
Staunton, July 11 – In order to boost the birthrate, the Russian government would like to make the three-child family the norm, but at present, only eight percent of Russians are parents of three or more children, and they are older, poorer, more rural and more likely to be related to Russian Orthodox priests than […]
