Staunton, April 9 – A major reason the crisis in Ukraine is now so dangerous, Georgy Mirsky says, is that “neither [Russian President Vladimir] Putin nor [US President Barack] Obama wants to go into history as the politician who ‘lost’ Ukraine, although [that country] does not belong to either the one or the other.” Crimea […]
This week, Boston College Professor Matt Sienkiewicz and Interpreter Magazine’s managing editor James Miller discuss the Russian President Vladimir Putin. What drives him? Do we really understand him? How do Russians view the West, and what is Russia’s endgame in eastern Europe? We examine these questions through an article written by John Schindler called Obama […]
Ukraine’s Interior Minister has given pro-Russian separatists who have taken over government buildings 48 hours to negotiate with authorities or they will be removed by force. Yesterday’s liveblog can be found here. For an overview and analysis of this developing story see our latest podcast. Please help The Interpreter to continue providing this valuable information […]
Staunton, April 8 – Muslims are quite comfortable living in Ukraine and have no interest in having the regions where they live be annexed to the Russian Federation where relations between Muslims and others are known to be far worse, according to a Daghestani native who has been living 35 years in Luhansk. Seyfulla Rashidov, […]
Staunton, April 8 – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promise to secure the full rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars, a promise made to obscure Russian aggression and to try to attract the support of some in that nation for his occupation of their homeland, is echoing not only among the larger and more organized of the […]
Staunton, April 7 – The domestic consequences of Moscow’s Crimean policy combined with Russia’s weakening economic prospects will drive ever more young Russians to seek work and possibly permanent residence abroad, an “exodus” that will hurt the country far more than any of the sanctions announced so far, according to Yevgeny Gontmakher. In today’s Moskovsky […]
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, […]
Kyiv, Ukraine — “Maidan shouldn’t be there,” said my friend as we sat in her kitchen in Kyiv. Before, when I was living there as a researcher interviewing the far right activists who would come to the center of the Ukrainian revolution, my friend’s kitchen was a reprieve from the politics of my work. We […]
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 the wake of the Crimean crisis, a senior editor of Russia’s Regnum news agency says, the three Baltic countries have become even more geopolitically significant than they were for both Russia and the West, but because of its own policy failures, Russia has lost any significant influence in Estonia, Latvia, and […]
