Staunton, August 11 – Not only has the Russian government reduced the number of hospital beds available to the Russian people and increased the amount they have to spend on health care, but it has failed to live up to its promises to pay medical personnel more, leaving ever more hospitals without staffs and transforming […]
Staunton, August 9 – Oleg Soskin, a Ukrainian political analyst, says that Vladimir Putin’s dismissal of 18 senior officers and other officials shows that he is preparing for a major war and does not want to listen to anyone who points to the dangers of that strategy, perhaps concerned that he might not be able […]
Staunton, August 9 – Russia’s economy was already in trouble before the West imposed sanctions and in time these sanctions could have led to the collapse of the Putin regime. But the Russian president’s decision to respond to these sanctions with a total economic confrontation with the West” will significantly “speed up” this scenario, Vladimir […]
Staunton, August 8 – Only two of the twelve venues in Russia for the 2018 World Cup are ready, three others are slated for massive reconstruction, and seven have not even been started. This pattern is starting to raise concerns about Moscow’s ability to host the games even as some groups are calling on FIFA […]
Staunton, August 8 – Putinism, Igor Eidman says, is “a combination of the practice and ideology of the authoritarian regime of Putin, which operates on a corrupt bureaucratic oligarchy and is in many respects close to a fascist dictatorship,” with its “aggressive annexationist foreign policy, state-monopoly capitalism, force structures, and chauvinism and traditionalism” promoted by […]
Staunton, August 8 – One of the “paradoxes” of Russian patriotism, Sergei Chernyakhovsky says, is that Western sanctions on Moscow for its actions in Ukraine have driven up Vladimir Putin’s popularity to unprecedented heights. Russians see Putin as standing up to the West and thus performing as they think a leader should. Chernyakhovsky, a professor […]
Staunton, August 7 – During the Cold War, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists rated the level of danger of a nuclear war in terms of the number of minutes the clock was running before midnight. Now, Russian historian Yuri Feltshtinsky has told a Polish newspaper that Vladimir Putin has set the world’s clock back […]
This week on The Interpreter podcast Boston College Professor Matt Sienkiewicz and The Interpreter’s managing editor James Miller are joined by The Interpreter’s editor-in-chief Michael Weiss to discuss the latest news from Ukraine. The key questions on everyone’s mind — will Russia invade Ukraine? What is Russia’s end game here? Why is Putin doing what […]
Staunton, August 4 – Despite the expectations of many in the West and the past behavior of the Russian government, politics, not economics are the driving force behind Vladimir Putin’s policies now: his Russia must now pursue survival rather than growth and thus “victory or death,” according to Konstantin Gaaze. In a commentary on Slon.ru […]
Staunton, July 31 – Moscow is directing predominantly ethnic Russian refugees from the fighting in southeastern Ukraine into non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation in a transparent effort to change the ethnic balance in those republics and further Russianize them, according to Marat Kulsharipov, a historian at Bashkortostan State University. In an interview to RFE/RL’s […]
