Staunton, July 11 – Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta is reporting today that resistance among officials in Russian-occupied Crimea to giving up Ukrainian citizenship has led the Russian labor ministry to seek a delay until the beginning of next year of a requirement announced in April that all officials on the peninsula do so or lose their […]
Staunton, July 11 – As it chooses a successor to Metropolitan Vladimir, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church faces two “mutually exclusive tasks”– survival as a church in an independent Ukraine and survival as part of the Russian Orthodox Church – and it lacks the unified hierarchy and understanding of Ukrainian society and the Moscow Patriarchate needed […]
Staunton, July 11 – Two-thirds of Russia’s 715,000 Buddhists, most of whom live in Buryatia, Tyva, and Kalmykia, are younger than 45, a majority lives in rural areas, and one in every four says Buddhism plays an important role in his or her life, including making its followers more tolerant of others than is the […]
Staunton, July 10 – In a move that recalls Kazan’s behavior during the 1990s, Farid Mukhametshin, the chairman of Tatarstan’s State Council, has called for the retention of the title of republic president and said that the Russian Duma had violated the Constitution and exceeded its authority by demanding that republics change that title to […]
Staunton, July 10 – Yuliya Yemalyanovich, a Belarusian school girl from Baranovichi, has won an international Russian-language Olympiad in Moscow by talking about the Belarusian language in which she declared her commitment both to that language and to the nation which speaks it. She competed against representatives from the CIS, the Baltic countries, Georgia, Abkhazia […]
Staunton, July 10 – Russian public opinion “is being prepared for a change in Kremlin policy” toward Ukraine, Moscow commentators say, with central government media now downplaying the need for and utility of force and playing up the ways in which Vladimir Putin can serve as “peacemaker.” But this shift in tone, which reflects increasing […]
Staunton, July 9 – Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea has already had a number of impacts on Russia, but some in the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church hope it will have at least one more – that special treatment of the church on the peninsula will become “a precedent for the clericalization” of all […]
Staunton, July 9 – As they have struggled with the end of empire, Russians have been going through the stages of a process familiar to anyone who has lost something: denial, anger, and grudging acceptance of what has happened and what the nature of the new reality is, according to Moscow psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya. In […]
Staunton, July 9 – Even though the West has imposed sanctions and Russia has promoted ties, Alyaksandr Lukashenka “fears Russia more than he fears the West,” according to Andrey Vardomatsky, a Belarusian sociologist who says this reflects a general inclination among his countrymen to overestimate Russia’s importance relative to that of the West. And that […]
Staunton, July 9 – Kyiv would like to see the Crimean ports of Yevpatoria, Kerch, Feodosia, Yalta and Sevastopol closed to international shipping to put pressure on Moscow to end its illegal occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula. The International Maritime Organization has not done that, but its declarations have nonetheless imposed real costs on Russia. […]
