Staunton, March 9 – Vladimir Putin’s acknowledgement that he personally decided upon and conducted a special operation to seize Crimea “opens a unique and limited-time window of opportunities” for the West to bring real pressure on him, divide his regime and force Moscow to change course, according to Slava Rabinovich. The Russian economist and blogger […]
Staunton, March 5 – Budapest has announced that it has handed out Hungarian citizenship papers to 94,000 people in Trans-Carpathia in Western Ukraine in expedited fashion. The Hungarian official responsible for nationality policy says that this is part of a broader effort to boost the size of the country’s population and points out that two-thirds […]
Staunton, March 5 – The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to suggest that old rules and old expectations no longer apply and thereby increase uncertainty and fear. That explains why someone like Kseniya Sobchak has suggested that she is next on Putin’s list now that the Kremlin has killed Boris Nemtsov and why an […]
Staunton, March 5 – Two weeks ago, Vladimir Putin named Aleksandr Levintal to head the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the Russian Far East, an action that Konstantin Kalachev says has reopened talk about the future of a region rich in natural resources but which “in fact is cut off from the rest of Russia” […]
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick writes the latest in our series on the anniversary of the Maidan Revolution and the birth of a new nation, Ukraine. Read the others in the series here. A year ago, Russian opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov, former first deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, and Alexey Navalny, an anti-corruption activist and blogger, were […]
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 […]
Staunton, February 3 – Calls by Russian politicians to rename Crimea “Tavrida” or “Tavriya” are part of an effort by Moscow to “de-Turkify” the peninsula and thereby separate the Crimean Tatars from the land “on which they arose and evolved,” according to Bekir Mamurov, editor in chief of Kyyrym. Mamutov, who is also a member […]
Staunton, February 25 – For Vladimir Putin, Belarus is “the key to the Baltic countries” as a military-strategic outpost and thus quite possibly Minsk will turn out to be “much more important for the Russian system than Ukraine is, according to Liliya Shevtsova, a Russian commentator now at the Brookings Institution. In an interview to […]
Staunton, February 24 — The war in Ukraine must be seen as a direct “continuation” of the decay and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Russia and many other of the countries which emerged from it to develop the kind of political institutions necessary for stability, according to Moscow commentator Ivan Sukhov. […]
Staunton, February 22 — Ever more often, life in Vladimir Putin’s world imitates not art but Soviet anecdotes. The latest move of his agents in occupied Crimea — to deny registration to and thus set the stage for shutting down Crimea’s QHA news agency — brings yet another of those anecdotes to mind. The story […]
