Staunton, January 5 – Riga faces a dramatically expanded Russian media campaign to discredit it in the eyes of Latvians and the West and an increase in the activity of Russian special services against it, according to Maris Cepuritis, a researcher at the Riga Center for Research on the Politics of Eastern Europe. The analyst […]
Staunton, December 24 – Ethnic Russians living in Latvia and Lithuania “view themselves as a community and respect Russian culture but consider their native home to be the countries where they live rather than Russia,” and this is true even of those born in Russia or who are not citizens of their countries of residence, […]
Staunton, December 22 – Vladimir Putin has agreed with proposals by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to require the heads of the federal subjects to bear responsibility for mobilization and fighting against diversionary forces, a step that makes them into something like tsarist-era governors general and could presage a new territorial delimitation of the country. At […]
Staunton, December 22 — Belarusian nationalists over the last year “not only have come out of ‘the political ghetto’ into which they have been since the end of the 1990s but also have become an influential political force” in Minsk, indeed a force that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka has had to take into consideration and play […]
Staunton, December 14 – Vyacheslav Nikonov, chairman of the Russian Duma education committee and head of the Russian World Foundation, told a Muslim forum in the Russian capital that “Moscow is not only the largest Islamic city in Russia but also the city with the largest Muslim population in Europe.” Speaking to the 10th International […]
Staunton, December 17 — Karelian nationalists who call for the independence of their republic and raise “unnecessary and harmful questions about additional state languages” there are being “seriously underestimated” as a threat to Petrozavodsk and Moscow, according to Sergey Pirozhnikov, a deputy in the republic legislative assembly. The reason that this small group is so […]
Staunton, December 16 – Mikhail Budaragin, the editor of the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party’s official website, says that Moscow’s relations with the West “will not last forever” and that Moscow can look forward to a return to normal as long as it remains committed to capitalism and does shift to another “economic model.” Budaragin’s comment […]
Staunton, December 15 – Russia’s economic problems combined with Moscow’s insistence on extracting just as much money from the regions as it did before is exacerbating relations between the center and the republics and prompting the latter to reconsider their attitude toward Russia as a whole, according to a Tatar analyst. A Kazan analyst who […]
Staunton, December 15 – Even as Moscow appears to be reducing its military actions in southeastern Ukraine, a “reduction” that is at least in part a disinformation campaign, Putin is making Belarus into a base for attacking Kyiv. The appearance of more Russian “little green men” in Gomel last week prompted some Ukrainians to ask […]
Staunton, December 9 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s call for the federalization of Ukraine and Petro Poroshenko’s suggestion that he is prepared to oversee steps toward the decentralization of power in his country, nothing can be done toward either under the current crisis conditions, according to Moscow’s leading expert on Ukraine. Bogdan Bezpalko, deputy director of […]
