Staunton, November 11 – Vladimir Putin’s declaration that Moscow will create a nuclear strike force capable of overcoming any anti-ballistic missile system works to Ukraine’s advantage both by showing to the world what his foreign policy is really about – a return to the Cold War – and by diverting, for a time, his focus […]
Staunton, October 3 – George Kennan’s famous “long telegram” of February 1946 was written to explain to Western leaders something they found difficult to understand: how Moscow could turn from being a wartime ally into an implacable enemy, a problem that some Western leaders are again finding it difficult to understand. hat makes rereading Kennan’s […]
The frenzied world-wide front is expanding Mercy to no one, no one, no one! Stanza from 1989 Russian anarchists’ song Vintovka – eto prazdnik (The Rifle is a Holiday) By the Russian punk bank Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) The annexation of Crimea, the “Novorossiya” project, and the fight against the “Kyiv junta” are not supported […]
Staunton, May 21 — No nation more skillfully used an international event than did the Circassians during the Sochi Olympiad to call attention to the Russian-orchestrated genocide of their people 150 years earlier. Despite Moscow’s best efforts, few independent reporters talked about Sochi without talking about the continuing crimes against the Circassians. In the past […]
Staunton, April 24 “Russia looks in a mirror and sees the USSR and thinks that all those around it see it that way, tries to conduct itself as the USSR did and considers the threats which the Soviet Union did,” Pavel Kazarin says. “But the West looks at Russia as Russia, wants a return to […]
Staunton, February 24 – The conflict in Ukraine is not one conflict but three: it is a conflict between the eastern and western portions of Ukraine, it is a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and it is a conflict between Russia and the West, Vladimir Pastukhov says. And to resolve all three will require a […]
The Interpreter and the Institute of Modern Russia present a special report by Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, and our editor-in-chief, Michael Weiss, on the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, culture and money to achieve foreign policy goals and undermine opponents. In recent […]
Staunton, October 12 – Pavel Felgengauer, one of Russia’s most widely respected independent defense and security analysts, says that as a result of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, a new Cold War has begun and Russia, all of Moscow’s bombast notwithstanding, has “already lost it.” In remarks to a meeting of the School of Civic Leaders […]
Staunton, September 8 – The current ceasefire ends one phase of the war between Russia and Ukraine making this a good time to consider the impact of the conflict in the broadest terms, as Moscow commentator Konstantin Gaaze does so in ten questions and answers. Gaaze’s first question is “Why did we (they) act as […]
Staunton, September 4 – The sharpening clash between Russia and the West is not a new cold war because it does not have the ideological content that the earlier conflict did, Viktor Krasilshchikov says, but that does not mean that it is simply a contest between the national interests of the countries involved. Instead, the […]
