Staunton, July 2 – Moscow should consider the problems that overly ambitious expansion has brought to both the European Union and NATO and not seek fall victim to the notion that it must expand the Eurasian Union as quickly and as far as possible, according to Aleksandr Krylov, a leading Russian specialist on the Caucasus. […]
Staunton, July 2 – The analogies people use to describe their situation often say far more than do their direct declarative statements because the former, unlike the latter, often provide the unspoken context for the thinking of those involved. That is what makes some of the analogies being drawn in Moscow now both instructive and […]
Staunton, July 2 – The consequences of Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed “Winter Olympics in the Subtropics” continue to unfold with officials cutting back on the promises they made to develop the tourism industry in the North Caucasus even as they continue to persecute those who objected to holding the competition in Sochi. Two weeks ago, Aleksandr […]
Staunton, July 1 – Xenophobia exists almost everywhere, based as it typically is in a sense of how different other peoples are and how distinctive one’s own is. And it has often been used by political leaders to mobilize their populations or distract their attention from domestic problems. But Russian Ukrainophobia is different in three […]
Staunton, July 1 – Given the Kremlin’s ability to mobilize the population via Moscow television, Vladimir Putin could “at any time” refuse to cooperate” with the West on Ukraine “and receive the support of society,” according to a lead article today by the editors of Nezavisimaya gazeta. That reality, the editors say, dramatically increases the […]
Staunton, July 1 – In the wake of the Crimean Anschluss, many Russians have predicted and many Ukrainians have been fearful that Ukraine could disintegrate as a country as a result of the actions of the Russian government and its agents in Eastern Ukraine. Exactly how that might happen and thus what Ukraine should do […]
Staunton, July 1 – Alyaksandr Lukashenka is the brutal ruler of Belarus, “the last dictator in Europe” to use the phrase often employed by Western diplomats and human rights activists. He has falsified elections to keep himself in power, he has imprisoned and exiled his political opponents, and he has trampled on the rights and […]
Staunton, July 1 – Leaders often acquire an epithet which prevents people from seeing them whole, sometimes to their advantage and sometimes not. One recent leader of whom this has been true, Oleg Kashin says, has been Mikhail Gorbachev, whose supporters and opponents now routinely forget that there was a time when the last Soviet […]
Staunton, June 30 – Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Center for the Study of Elites at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology and Russia’s most distinguished student of elites and their rotation, says that “Putin’s successor is already in his closest entourage” and that Putin may even decide who it will be. In an […]
Staunton, June 30 – Roman Silantyev, notorious for his attacks on Muslims in the Russian Federation but close to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian security agencies, says that the FSB plans for “the liquidation of radical Islamic organizations in Crimea.” Silantyev told Rosbalt last week that the Russian security services […]
