Staunton December 21 — Even as Vladimir Putin continues to talk about the Russian world and the importance of reuniting it after the demise of the Soviet Union, the number and share of ethnic Russians in all former Soviet republics and occupied Baltic countries have declined, in many cases precipitously and with no sign that […]
Staunton, November 28 – Analysts and officials in both Moscow and the West have long operated under the assumption that Russia will always be able to retain Belarus as a reliable satellite. But recent statements by Alyaksandr Lukashenko and actions by Belarusian nationalists are raising questions about that assumption. In an article yesterday on the […]
Staunton, August 25 – The flow of ethnic Russian refugees from Ukraine is giving Russia “a truly historical opportunity to restore the ethnic balance in the North Caucasus Federal District” by reversing the decline in the share of the Slavic population there over recent years and thus defending Russia against the Muslim south, according to […]
Staunton, August 24 – Stalin made “an error” in annexing Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact because what Moscow needed with war on the horizon was “the establishment of buffer states on the border of the USSR and not their being pulled into the Union itself,” with all the border changes that […]
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 […]
