Staunton, September 25 – Just as the Soviet government sought to evade its responsibility for the murder of Polish officers during World War II by blaming the Germans, so too the Russian government of Vladimir Putin is seeking to evade responsibility for its killings in Ukraine by blaming Ukrainian forces for them, according to Vitaly […]
Staunton, July 24 – The central Russian narrative on the emergence of the three modern nations of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, a narrative on which Vladimir Putin relies, is that there was a single Russian nation a millennium ago and that Ukrainians and Belarusians were byproducts of Russian ethnogenesis, the result of outside interference. That […]
Staunton, July 13 – In the summer of 1942, during the height of fighting on the eastern front, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg issued a series of attacks on German soldiers that mirror imaged Nazi propaganda, describing German soldiers as less than human and calling on Soviet citizens to kill them wherever and whenever they found […]
Updated Daily. Building on years of Russian journalists’ reporting, Western media are now covering the Kremlin’s paid troll army, citing forums moderators’ experience, leaked documents, and local infiltrators, and uncovering how “web brigades” have been skewing public debate on Ukraine. Authorities are rounding up more suspects in the Bolotnaya Square demonstration case even two years […]
Staunton, May 26 – Vladimir Putin “has lost the shortest cold war in history,” Yevgeny Ikhlov says. After having seized Crimea for Russia 12 weeks ago and effectively challenged the West to a contest, the Kremlin leader has backed away from his larger plan to counterpose a “Russian world” to everyone else. In a commentary […]
Staunton, May 1 – Today, for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union and reflecting what Russian commentators say is a patriotic “wave” and “nostalgia” for the USSR, a May Day parade is passing through Red Square — although Vladimir Putin is not atop the Lenin Mausoleum, as his Soviet predecessors were, […]
Staunton, April 27 – One of the darkest pages in Soviet and indeed Russian history was the anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin unleashed against everything Western in 1949, a campaign that ultimately focused on the Jews whom the Soviet dictator was planning to deport beyond the Urals at the time of his death. Even those who remain […]
Staunton, April 20 – The US Department of State has declared that Washington will never recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but such declarations, important as they are, need to be given real content to ensure that no part of the government, intentionally or otherwise, takes steps that undermine that policy. In short, what is needed […]
