Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Makey, the Belarusian foreign minister, continued to distance Minsk from Moscow by saying that his country seeks a “balance” between Europe and Russia, a statement to a Prague paper that underscores the concerns of Belarus about its own fate in the wake of Moscow’s Crimean Anschluss and Minsk’s new efforts […]
Staunton, April 29 – Mustafa Cemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement whom Russian authorities have banned from entering his homeland until 2019, says that the Russian security service has told him and by extension his nation that its members must submit to Russian rule, face prison, or, even more ominously, “disappearance.” Despite […]
Staunton, April 28 – Many Russians believe and many in the West accept the notion that Ukrainians and Belarusians are offshoots of the formation and growth of the Russian nation, a reflection of a sometimes innocent confusion between nation building and state building but often as now the result of Kremlin efforts to rewrite history […]
Staunton, April 28 – Many in Russia and the West have speculated that the combination of Vladimir Putin’s policies against Ukraine, Moscow’s increasing isolation internationally, and deteriorating economic conditions at home will eventually lead to a Maidan-style challenge to his rule. That is possible, of course, but a man identified as a former FSB officer […]
Staunton, April 28 – Vladimir Putin’s moves against Ukraine are part of his larger plan not only to restore a country with the borders of the USSR but also to re-establish Moscow’s dominance in Eastern Europe and in Asia, according to Vitaly Portnikov in a comment to Gordunua.com. Putin clearly wants to occupy “all of […]
Staunton, April 27 – When an individual, a leader or a country takes something personally rather than viewing it as being in the way of business, that makes the situation far more dangerous because the usual options others have for countering actions taken on the basis of hard-headed calculation fall away. Still worse, such shifts […]
Staunton, April 26 – Tatar organizations in the Middle Volga have nominated Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement, for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step that calls attention to Cemilev’s efforts to defend his land against Russian aggression and growing ties between the Tatars of Crimea and the Tatars of […]
Staunton, April 26 – There is an old Soviet joke that the West sends diplomats to Moscow and Moscow treats them like spies while Moscow dispatches spies to Western capitals and Western governments treat them like diplomats, a joke that had more than a little basis in fact and that resonates now because of what […]
Updated Daily. The Russian parliament has passed a number of laws designed to rein in an increasingly free and outspoken blogosphere, lately filled with criticism of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Legislators have passed a law mandating bloggers with more than 3,000 readers to register as mass media under the restrictive Russian press law. If dissenters […]
Staunton, April 25 – Sometimes satire is the only vehicle available to express one’s outrage at what is going on and one’s hope that the current situation can be changed for the better. And Vadim Shtepa, one of Russia’s most prominent regionalists, has used it to imagine how what Putin is doing now might land […]
