Staunton, July 27 – In a Facebook post that has been picked up by various Armenian outlets, Tigran Khemalyan, a noted filmmaker, sharply criticizes those ethnic Armenians who have become more Russian than the patriarch and who are promoting Russian great power attitudes of hostility and suspicion to everything non-Russian. Among these “’prophets’ of Russism,” […]
Staunton, July 16 – Because Vladimir Putin has chosen to turn toward the past rather than the future as shown most recently by his “having unleashed a war in Ukraine,” the Kremlin leader has become “the last soldier of the Empire, who will shoot his last bullet even as the Empire draws its last breath,” […]
Staunton, June 6 – Vladimir Putin has adopted the rhetoric of national self-determination and federalism in Ukraine, but a leading Russian regionalist site says that this is “hypocrisy and a farce” which should deceive no one and especially not regionalists and federalists in Russia because it is only “a cover for an aggressive imperial policy.” […]
Staunton, May 15 – Separatist and pro-German sentiment among ethnic Russians in Kaliningrad reflects not only German revanchist efforts but the threat of “the alienation of young from the Russian world” if they are “cut off” for a lengthy period from Russia and if Moscow acts as if “’there are no problems’” with such people, […]
Staunton, May 15 – Russian commentators have talked openly about dividing up Ukraine and Moldova in order to support ethnic Russian communities there and weaken these two countries, but now one Moscow writer has taken such ideas further and called for the dividing up of Romania in support of Russian national interests in the Balkans. […]
Staunton, April 24 – The Russian language and Russian culture are today “the main unifying factor[s]” for the citizens of the Russian Federation, unlike history which continues to be a source of divisions given that different groups have different understandings of past events, according to the Valdai International Discussion Club. The Moscow Higher School of […]
Staunton, April 23 – The best way to understand the events of the last several months, Stanislav Belkovsky argues, is to view them as a repetition of the August 1991 coup with only this difference: the leader of this coup is Vladimir Putin and the target of his radical shifts is the Putin of the […]
Staunton, April 22 – Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” project of “empire instead of a nation state and dictatorship instead of democracy” is far more popular his country than calls for the development of a civic nation, Mariya Snegova says, but it will end, as all other such projects in Russian history have, with “a catastrophe” […]
Staunton, April 21 – Russian nationalism, “however strange this may seem” to its adherents and to others as well, in fact shares many the same structural features of feminism, according to Natalya Kholmogorova, herself a leading Russian nationalist commentator in Moscow. She argues that the two both involve “a community of people who are arithmetically […]
Staunton, April 21 – Latvia may be as prepared as any small country next to a very large one to defend itself against a military invasion. It has a modernized military, albeit one trained for peacekeeping rather than national defense, and it is a member of NATO, on whose Article Five Latvians rely. At least, […]
