Staunton, March 23 — “The Russian occupation regime” in Crimea is “worse than the Soviet one,” according to Mustafa Cemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, in large part because Vladimir Putin couldn’t find a Ramzan Kadyrov-type leader among them and thus has chosen the path of direct rather than indirect repression instead. Speaking before […]
Staunton, March 11 – The new cold war that has begun in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not have the formal ideological shape of its predecessor, but Vladimir Putin very much has an ideological vision, Igor Eidman says, and it is one that tragically makes it more likely that this cold war […]
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 […]
Welcome to our column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here. UPDATES BELOW Anna Duritskaya, the Ukrainian companion of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov who was with him on the night of his murder is not being […]
Staunton, February 24 – Moscow’s “main goal” in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at the present time is to convince portions of the population of these three countries that NATO will not defend them if Moscow uses the kind of hybrid war it has used against Ukraine and thus spark defeatist attitudes before any such attack […]
I have called the year 2014 an annus horribilis, as opposed to the annus mirabilis 25 years ago that gave our part of the world the chance to opt for freedom and democracy. I hate numerology but it is really odd to see that a quarter of a century after the amazing flowering of democracy […]
Staunton, February 16 – If President Obama follows German Chancellor Merkel and doesn’t arm Ukraine, the US president will not only “be playing the role Putin has assigned to him” but he will also open the way toward an effort by Moscow to dominate the Baltic countries while threatening the world with first use of […]
Staunton, February 6 — Over the last two year period for which statistics are available, only 37 ethnic Russians moved from Estonia to the Russian Federation despite Moscow’s program for resettling what it calls “compatriots” and the regular complaints of Russian officials that Estonia is oppressing its ethnic Russian minority. In February 6 issue of […]
Staunton, January 23 — Following the “tectonic” shifts in the world that Russia’s moves in Ukraine began, the leaders of the Baltic countries must recognize “the need to have a dialogue with Russia,” the head of the Moscow Institute for the Russian Abroad says. If they don’t, others who are ready to do so “will […]
Staunton, January 22 — “Post-Soviet Russian nationalism has been fatally flawed from the outset because it arose not from the word ‘nation’ but from the word ‘nationality,’” a reflection of the fact that a Russian “nation” in the normal of sense that term does not yet exist in Russia, according to Vadim Shtepa. In a […]
