Staunton, November 19 – Faced with a united front in the West, Andrey Piontkovsky says, Putin may seek “to freeze the Ukrainian conflict and then to save face as a patriot of ‘the Russian world’ decide to take certain steps in the Caucasus as he is doing now,” something that threatens all three of the […]
Staunton, November 19 – There are “no influential forces in the Kremlin now” calling for peace in Ukraine or with Russia’s other neighbors, independent Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet says. There are only various groups calling for war and differing only on when, where and how to carry out a full-scale war with Ukraine. In a […]
Staunton, November 18 – A leader, someone has said, can tolerate almost any attack, but he needs to worry if people begin to laugh at him. Russians have a long history of telling anecdotes about their leaders – jokes allow for deniability – and this humor has not always cost those in charge their positions […]
Staunton, November 18 – Articles predicting in apocalyptic terms that Vladimir Putin’s deals with China will lead to Russia’s loss of Siberia and the Far East are now a regular feature on the Russian blogosphere. But more seriously and in any case more immediately, a Tajik analyst says, Moscow has already ceded its dominance in […]
Staunton, November 18 – Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine are not part of a broader imperial program but rather a tactical move on the part of the Kremlin leader to shore up his power in Moscow, something that makes any resolution of the conflict in Ukraine more rather than less difficult, according to Liliya Shevtsova. […]
Staunton, November 10 – The primitivism in the thinking of Vladimir Putin and his entourage reflects the fact that he and they are members of the generation that was “the most Soviet of all those who arose after 1917,” cut off from those who could remember pre-1917 conditions and fully socialized in the communist system, […]
Staunton, November 8 – What Russians now have in the Russian Federation is a Soviet system without communism and its administrative arrangements, and what they dream of is “a Soviet empire without communists,” an entity not equivalent to the tsarist empire as some think but one that reflects their memories of the USSR. That is […]
Staunton, November 8 – Ever more people equate Vladimir Putin with Russia, something that for most Russians is a positive, but that for others is a negative thing, the editors of Gazeta say, noting that this “personification” entails “a serious danger “not only for the powers that be but also for the country as a […]
Staunton, September 27 – Vladimir Putin has accumulated all the power he could possibly need to move in almost any direction, but despite that, “it is impossible to define with any precision what in fact [he] wants to do” because he does not appear to have any medium or long-term plan, according to Tatyana Stanovaya. […]
Staunton, September 5 – From the very first moments of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, “optimists” in Russia and the West have deceived themselves and others and helped set the stage for Putin to go further, a pattern that shows no signs of abating anytime soon, according to Vitaly Portnikov. On the Grani.ru portal, the […]
