After the horror of the fire in Odessa last night, the world is nervously waiting to see both how the Ukrainian government handles this tragedy, and whether the Kremlin will use this as the provocation they’ve been waiting for. Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see […]
Staunton, May 1 – Fewer than one Russian in five has been beyond the borders of what was the Soviet Union in the last five years, and only one in 16 currently travels abroad on a regular basis. But the declining value of the ruble as a result of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine and Western […]
Staunton, April 29 – Despite Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s comment four days ago that he “hadn’t heard” about any South Ossetian calls for that republic to follow the example of Crimea, a conference organized by the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies says that South Ossetia will be part of the Russian Federation by […]
Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Makey, the Belarusian foreign minister, continued to distance Minsk from Moscow by saying that his country seeks a “balance” between Europe and Russia, a statement to a Prague paper that underscores the concerns of Belarus about its own fate in the wake of Moscow’s Crimean Anschluss and Minsk’s new efforts […]
Staunton, April 29 – The Kremlin thought it had a winning propaganda theme offered up by some in the United States by “the sacramental question: ‘Do you want to die for Narva?’” Andrey Pionkovsky says, because in fact no one in the West “will ever go to war with Russia in the defense of Estonia” […]
Staunton, April 29 – Mustafa Cemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement whom Russian authorities have banned from entering his homeland until 2019, says that the Russian security service has told him and by extension his nation that its members must submit to Russian rule, face prison, or, even more ominously, “disappearance.” Despite […]
After yesterday’s violence in Donetsk and the shooting of Kharkiv Mayor Gennady Kernes, the situation is extremely volatile in south-east Ukraine today. The European Union and Canada have followed the United States in announcing new waves of sanctions against Russian and Ukrainian officials involved in both the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of south-east […]
Staunton, April 28 – Vladimir Putin’s moves against Ukraine are part of his larger plan not only to restore a country with the borders of the USSR but also to re-establish Moscow’s dominance in Eastern Europe and in Asia, according to Vitaly Portnikov in a comment to Gordunua.com. Putin clearly wants to occupy “all of […]
Staunton, April 27 – When an individual, a leader or a country takes something personally rather than viewing it as being in the way of business, that makes the situation far more dangerous because the usual options others have for countering actions taken on the basis of hard-headed calculation fall away. Still worse, such shifts […]
Staunton, April 26 – Tatar organizations in the Middle Volga have nominated Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement, for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step that calls attention to Cemilev’s efforts to defend his land against Russian aggression and growing ties between the Tatars of Crimea and the Tatars of […]
