Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, former head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for relations between church and society, has called for the creation of special death squads to hunt down and destroy emigres perceived as traitors to Russia.
Only two things motivate Russians today: their salaries and the fear of losing their jobs; this is why Russian officials seek to hide unemployment by cutting back hours and wages.
The most interesting aspect of Moscow’s retreat from its efforts to promote a civic Russian nation is that it represents a personal defeat for Vladimir Putin.
“The efforts of the contemporary West to discover a soul where it by nature has never been, namely in the body of a KGB lieutenant colonel, led the lieutenant colonel to be ever bolder,” says Igor Yakovenko.
US-based Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova recalls Aleksandr Shchetinin, the Russian-Ukrainian journalist behind the site Novy Region-2 who died in mysterious circumstances the day before Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed, and others who have died in the intervening period in what appear to be somewhat mysterious circumstances.
Protests are increasing around Russia for political as well as social reasons although they are nearly invisible, not covered in the state media or even in Western media.
One of the most beloved and effective arguments of those who favor a softer approach to Moscow regardless of what it does is that such an approach will help liberals in the Kremlin win out. But as two leading Russian analysts point out in a new essay, “there are no liberals” there.
Moscow isn’t happy with Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s acts of independence, but as long as he does not cross its “red line” by breaking with the union state and other Russian-dominated institutions, it will not seek to oust him
Grigory Khanin, a Siberian professor, and Dmitry Fomin, a Novosibirsk graduate system say that in many cases, official Russian data does not correspond to reality, and Russia thus lags farther behind the West than admitted.
The apparent collapse of Putin’s calculations that the new US Administration he so openly backed would deliver a “big deal” may in fact make the Kremlin leader more dangerous.
