Staunton, December 6 – Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite says that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin until the Kremlin leader changes his course, and that she does not see any need for that given the multiple channels that Western countries have for interacting with the Russian government. To deal with […]
Staunton, November 30 – Announcements that the Russian government will give the Moscow Patriarchate two billion rubles (40 million US dollars) over the next two years to open “spiritual-enlightenment centers” at a time when Moscow is cutting funding for the social and medical needs of Russians will further undermine Russian Orthodoxy in Russia. On the […]
Staunton, November 25 – Some draftees in the Russian army are inflicting injuries on themselves in order to avoid being sent to the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, an indication of their fears about what might happen to them there and of growing opposition to the Kremlin’s aggression, according to Elena Vasilyeva. Vasilyeva, a Russian human […]
Staunton, November 24 – One of the most dangerous developments for which Vladimir Putin is responsible is that the lies he and his regime regularly employ, and the actions they take, have changed what would be unthinkable under normal conditions into a new normal, things which people would earlier have focused on into things which […]
Staunton, November 21 – On the first anniversary of the beginning of the Maidan demonstrations, Vitaly Portnikov says, it is important to understand that “Putin lost Ukraine even before the Maidan, before the dispersal of the students, before the bloodshed, before the occupation or Crimea and before the war in the Donbass.” He lost it, […]
Staunton, November 21 – Vladimir Putin rarely has been willing to retreat from any of his decisions even when they have clearly been shown to be wrong, but he has done so in the case of the office of the presidency in Tatarstan, an indication of just how important the Volga Tatars have become for […]
Staunton, September 30 – At a time when Moscow is cutting spending on education and health and in an indication of the importance the Kremlin places on propaganda, the Russian government is going to increase the amount of money it will give to the television channel Russia Today or RT.com next year 41 percent over […]
Staunton, September 16 – Moscow’s demands for a voice in the definition of the policies of the Ukrainian state are “something unheard of in the contemporary world,” Georgy Kunadze, who served as Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation at the beginning of the Yeltsin period, says. “It is impossible to satisfy them,” he continues […]
Staunton, September 14 – Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate has “no influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin or on Kremlin policy,” according to Patriarch Filaret, head of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate. Instead, Filaret said in Lviv on September 13, influence runs in the other direction […]
Staunton, September 9 – In his latest update on Stalinism as “effective management,” Vladimir Putin has disbanded Russia’s Regional Affairs Ministry, yet another sign of his drive to further centralize the country, eliminate any serious discussion of Russia’s regions and their problems, and thus undermine any chance that Moscow will have an effective nationality policy. […]
