Staunton, December 17 – For much of the past year, many commentators have focused on the flood of refugees from southeastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, but now, given economic and political instability in Russia, Ukraine must be prepared for a flood of refugees from the east, according to Sergey Datsyuk. Speaking at a Kyiv […]
In the last two days we have witnessed an incredible, rapid, steep, and perhaps unstoppable collapse in the value of the ruble. As of 9:15 AM Eastern today, the ruble is down more than 13%. By the time I publish this, that figure will be out of date. One look at today’s graph shows that […]
Staunton, December 9 – The Russian government has never been pleased by the fact that it must now deal with more than 80 Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs) rather than a single centralized one. Meanwhile, some Muslim leaders – most prominently Talgat Tajuddin of Ufa – have sought to form a Moscow patriarchate-style central leadership to […]
Staunton, December 5 – The process by which a government draws the electoral map in such a way that the number of its opponents in parliament will be minimized, long known in the West as “gerrymandering,” has now come to Russia in a big way and is being employed by Moscow for exactly the same […]
Staunton, December 5 – Even as evidence mounts that the Russian Federation may be more fragile than other post-Soviet states and that its aggression in Ukraine may accelerate its disintegration along ethnic or regional lines, Vitaly Tretyakov says that “Russia was and will continue to remain an empire.” Tretyakov, dean of the television faculty at […]
Staunton, November 30 – The ethnonym “Tatar” has a long a complicated history, one that reflects both the understanding and confusions of investigators and officials and that highlights both real links and imaginary ones, according to Pavel Gusterin, a specialist on Central Asia and the Middle East at the Russian Institute for Strategic Research. In […]
Staunton, November 30 – Seventy-five years ago, Moscow launched what became known as the Winter War against Finland. It used much the same propaganda and tactics it is using against Ukraine now. It faced far greater resistance than its vast disproportion of forces had led it to believe. And thanks to that resistance, it achieved […]
Staunton, November 29 – The continuing decline in oil prices, a political move by the West against Moscow, should cause Russians to recall Stalin’s warning in 1931 that “we are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries and must catch up within ten years. Either we will do that or they will crush us,” […]
Staunton, November 28 – Because Vladimir Putin continues to insist that there are no Russian military personnel in Ukraine, the Russian defense ministry has been forced to use ever more euphemisms in order to hide the reality that Russian soldiers are dying there. Now, the Russian dead will be called “those who died in exercises […]
Staunton, November 28 – Russian aggression in Ukraine has opened a new divide in the West between those who take freedom for granted and those who know that it must be defended or it can be lost, according to Vladimir Vyatrovich, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. Many in the West have […]
