Staunton, November 3 – Vladimir Putin has not only moved the Valdai Club from its original venue but has also transformed it from “an analogue to Western think tanks” with “a free dialogue” into an exemplar of what Samuel Huntington called “the clash of civilizations,” according to Vadim Shtepa. The Kremlin leader began this transformation […]
Staunton, November 3 – Andrey Illarionov says that recent statements by Vladimir Putin suggest that the Kremlin leader may be about to exploit the crash of the Russian plane in Sinai in much the same way that he did the apartment bombings in 1999, to unify Russian society behind even harsher measures against “terrorists.” The […]
Staunton, November 4 – The Russian Federation is not sustainable in its current form, Liliya Shevtsova says. “It is the last empire of its type in the 21st century, and it cannot respond to a single contemporary challenge.” Consequently, it “is on the road to the cemetery” but just when is impossible to say. In […]
Staunton, November 4 – Russian trains now travel at “almost the same average speed” they did in the middle of the 19th century, and Russian Rail remains a Soviet-style monopoly for all the talk about innovations over the last 15 years, according to a new study which points to these shortcomings as a major reason […]
Staunton, November 3 – In the final decades of the Soviet Union, many in the non-Russian union republics began to ask why some of them were headed by members of their titular nationalities and others by Russians and increasingly demanded that members of the titular nation occupy key posts. Over time, Moscow backed down, first […]
Staunton, November 2 – Because of Russian actions, more than 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled the Donbass and Crimea either to other parts of Ukraine thus becoming internally displaced persons, and more than 1 million have fled to Russia and other countries, a number that is “much larger than” the refugee flow into Europe from […]
Staunton, November 2 – Yevgeny Messner (1891-1974), last chief of staff of the Kornilov Division of Baron Wrangel’s White Russian Army and later a member of the Russian Liberation Army during World War II, wrote the book that forms the basis for what is now known as Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid war” strategy. That book, Mutiny […]
Staunton, November 2 – The Russian government may succeed in keeping secret figures about the casualties from its various wars, but it is powerless to conceal the staggering indirect losses from those conflicts, including among other things an increasing number of single-parent families and orphans, according to Marat Syrtlanov, a retired Russian colonel. “To speak […]
Staunton, October 30 – Today, many people in the Russian Federation will pause to remember the victims of political repressions in the USSR, in particular the members of the 14 peoples who were deported en masse and the 48 other nations who were deported or otherwise repressed only in part, a list that even more […]
Staunton, October 27 – The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Russian Federation is growing “out of control,” according to Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova, as a result of which the number of HIV/AIDS cases in that country, already growing at about 10,000 new cases annually, is likely to increase by 250 percent over the next five years. […]
