In declaring the Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist organization, Vladimir Putin’s regime is following in the steps of Hitler and Stalin both of whom sought to extirpate this religious group
The Kremlin has imposed a media blackout on the Russian truckers’ strike that is now in its third week and has been joined by drivers in at least 80 federal subjects, but unfortunately, coverage of this worker action by the Western media has been almost as sparse.
From making world leaders wait for meetings to mafia-like language from its leaders and diplomats to flouting international law by invading and occupying neighboring countries, Russia’s national strategy under Vladimir Putin is based on behaving so badly that others don’t seem to know how to react.
The long-haul truckers’ strike, the largest and most consequential labor action in Russia since the end of the USSR, is a development few Russians and even fewer people abroad know about because the Kremlin has given an order to the central and regional media outlets to understate the size of the action and the motives behind it.
Andrey Bazhutkin, the leader of the united long-haul truckers organization, says that drivers are now on strike “in more than 80 regions of Russia,”
While the Soviet Union was ahead of the West on some health measures, Russia today is now behind on every measure for which statistics are comparable, experts say. Incomes and consumption continue to fall with ten percent of Russians now not being paid enough to feed themselves.
Just as he has in the past, Vladimir Putin is counting on being able to exploit the latest horrific terrorist attack in Russia to boost his authority, and to tighten the screws on Russian society.
MPs are proposing that with the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it’s time to bury Lenin.
The release of a few prisoners and “the stylistic softening of the Russian regime” has led some to suggest Vladimir Putin is promoting “a thaw” on the model of the 1950s, Sergey Shelin says, completely forgetting that such a move “does not contradict” either growing centralization of power or greater restrictions on the life of the population.
Although most observers recognize that Moscow is treating the Minsk Accords as a dead letter, few of them have focused on a more serious aspect of the Kremlin’s current policy in Ukraine: its effort to seize Mariupol and thus gain a land corridor to Russian-occupied Crimea.
