Staunton, May 31 – Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said this week that Armenia could join the Eurasian Union only as a country with the borders recognized by the United Nations, a statement that clearly shocked Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan by suggesting that the union won’t support his claims on Karabakh or other portions of Azerbaijan. […]
Staunton, May 31 – In the 1950s, North Korea was developing rapidly and South Korea was extremely poor, but over the succeeding decades, North Korea cut itself off from the world, became ever more authoritarian, and bankrupted itself with massive military spending. South Korea did just the reverse and is now the economic powerhouse on […]
Staunton, 31 May – Official statistics show that health care services in Russia’s Pskov oblast which adjoins Estonia and Latvia have deteriorated rapidly in recent years to the point of crisis, according to a report by Lev Shlosberg, a Yabloko party member of the oblast legislative assembly. In a presentation to regional legislators, he said […]
Staunton, May 30 – Despite the rise of a Russian middle class and the rapid turnover in that country’s leaders and regimes, Vladimir Putin draws his support from the fact that Russian society remains tied to its peasant past, with most people not more than a generation or so removed from the culture of the […]
Staunton, May 30 – Now that the Chechens have become involved as foot soldiers in Vladimir Putin’s campaign to destabilize and potentially occupy portions of Ukraine, it is worth comparing Moscow’s “counter-terrorist” campaign in the North Caucasus with what Kyiv is doing in its eastern region. Such a comparison is especially useful now because it […]
Staunton, May 30 -Putin’s repressive policies in Crimea and in Moscow have distracted attention from two other disturbing developments: the tendency of regional leaders to curry favor by going beyond what the center has required and attempts by some post-Soviet regimes to use Moscow’s actions as a guide or cover for crackdowns of their own. […]
Staunton, May 29 – As unwelcome as the crisis in Abkhazia is for the Russian government given its focus on Ukraine, a Moscow commentator says, the Kremlin has no choice but to intervene and force Aleksandr Ankvab to enter into dialogue with the opposition. If it doesn’t, the problems in Abkhazia will spread to South […]
Staunton, May 29 – Even if the recent much-ballyhooed rise in Russian fertility rate were to last and that is almost certainly impossible, a Moscow State University demographer says, the population of the country would decline by half over the next 50 years. In fact, it is likely to decline further and faster than that. […]
Staunton, May 28 – In what he describes as an act of “political bookkeeping,” Andrey Lipsky, the deputy chief editor of Novaya Gazeta describes what Russia has gained and what it has lost so far as a result of the Ukrainian crisis, thus providing a useful checklist of the balance now and its likely direction […]
Staunton, May 28 – In what the Kremlin is likely to see as the most disturbing blowback of its backing of the Donetsk separatists in Ukraine, a group of veterans of the Georgian-Abkhaz war have stormed a government building in Sukhumi and demanded the resignation of that breakaway republic’s president, an indication of how easily […]
