Staunton, July 6 – In a declaration that may play to the current nationalist upsurge among Russians and appears to enjoy the backing of Vladimir Putin but seriously threatens their country’s future in two ways, Russia’s minister of culture says that non-Russians should study Russian more and Russians should study foreign languages less. Speaking to […]
Staunton, July 6 – An article of faith among many commentators on Russia since the Crimean Anschluss is that the patriotic wave the Kremlin has promoted has swept across the entire country and is likely to be even stronger in traditional areas than in Moscow and other major urban centers. That view in some cases […]
Staunton, July 6 – On July 5, the Russian occupation authorities in Crimea blocked Refat Chubarov, head of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, from returning to his homeland from Kherson Region where he was attending a meeting, an action that repeats their exclusion of Mustafa Cemilev on May 3 and that is now a key part […]
Staunton, July 5 – The 27 major Turkish ports that normally handle international shipping will not allow any ship to dock if it carries papers declaring that its home port in “Russian Crimea” rather than in Ukraine or has passed through such an occupied port, according to a decision of the Turkish council of ministers […]
Staunton, July 5 – “Putin’s Russia has already long been a Reich” much like Hitler’s Germany, but ordinary Russians now, like ordinary Germans 75 years ago, have not taken note of the fact because so far the state’s repressive attentions have not been directed primarily at them, according to Vitaly Portnikov. Portnikov, a Ukrainian commentator […]
Staunton, July 5 – The best way to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing, most recently in his speech to Russian diplomats, Aleksandr Golts says in a commentary in Yezhednevny Zhurnal yesterday is to imagine a similar speech by Putin to the members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In such an imaginary situation, the […]
Staunton, July 5 – Russia currently is confronted by five socio-cultural crises at one and the same time, and any effort to solve them quickly by force will lead to the disintegration of society and the state, much as such efforts have done elsewhere, according to Moscow commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov. Indeed, he suggests in an […]
Staunton, July 5 – It is a longstanding observation that the power to tax is the power to destroy, but a corollary of this is now on display in the Russian Federation, where Moscow’s power to re-allocate resources for regions that can’t raise them on their own and then blame the regions for that decision […]
Staunton, July 4 – Much of the world has been shocked by the violent clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma, clashes that have claimed many lives and destabilized that southeast Asian nation. But now there is a risk that a similar kind of conflict could emerge in predominantly Buddhist Kalmykia, a republic in southern […]
Staunton, July 4 – If Azerbaijan and Turkey, two Turkic countries, adopt a principled position of support for the Crimean Tatars, Moscow will have to change its current approach to the Turkic nation on the peninsula and live up to its earlier promises, according to Refat Chubarov, the head of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis. In […]
