Staunton, April 12 – Boris Slavin, an aide to former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, says that in his “personal” view, “sooner or later the restoration of a state like the USSR will be achieved,” although he said that “of course, this will not be a unification in the style of the Soviet Union.” He says […]
Staunton, April 12 – If Kyiv were forced to introduce Russian-style federalism in Ukraine as Moscow is demanding, the consequences would be that “the sphere of use of the Russian language would not increase” as many imagine “but contract,” according to Kirill Yankov, a member of the Yabloko Party and a researcher at the Moscow […]
Staunton, April 12 – Vladimir Putin insists that his moves in Ukraine are motivated by a desire to protect ethnic Russians, Russian speakers and, Moscow’s latest category, “pro-Russian people” who do not want to live under Kyiv, a view that has been uncritically accepted by large numbers of Russians in the Russian Federation and by […]
Staunton, April 12 – The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has always used priests from Russia to spread its influence and that of Moscow more generally in the former Soviet republics, but now the Moscow Islamic University has announced a new twist on that tactic: it will train Russian-speaking mullahs for the Muslims […]
Staunton, April 12 – The Russian government is celebrating what it says is a success in its battle to reduce alcohol consumption by pointing to a decline of seven percent in vodka sales in 2013. But more than three out of four Russians say they are drinking as much or more as in the past, […]
Updated Daily. A professor who compared Putin’s forcible annexation of the Crimea was fired from his position, but then later re-instated after protests. But for how long? Meanwhile, bloggers face new challenges as conservative legislators seek to equate bloggers with media outlets under the restrictive Russian press law. Go here, here, and here for past […]
Staunton, April 9 – It is now common ground that Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea represents a revision of the 1991 settlement involving the end of the USSR, with some portraying this as an indication that “Russia is back” and others viewing it as the kind of revanchism that inevitably threatens the international system. But […]
Staunton, April 7 The West has not responded to Russian aggression in Ukraine because the West has lived without an enemy for some years and thus fears having an enemy even when Russia or another country acts like one, according to the French historian Alan Besançon. In an interview with a Polish weekly on Friday, […]
Staunton, April 7 One of the consequences of the propaganda campaign against Kyiv that has accompanied Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and moves elsewhere in Ukraine is that it has displaced the anti-Caucasus theme in the Russian media that had so animated Russians until very recently, according to Ruslan Kurbanov. On the one hand, this […]
Staunton, April 7 In yet another indication that public support for Vladimir Putin is not as deep as many think and that he might not win re-election in a free and fair vote, his United Russia Party candidate for mayor of Novosibirsk lost to an opposition figure when, as has seldom been the case, the […]
