Staunton, February 18 – The head of the FSB in Crimea says that “anti-Russian risings do not yet threaten” the peninsula but that Western intelligence services are creating the basis for them, a claim that the Russian security services are likely to invoke as justification for a sweeping new crackdown. And one commentator with whom […]
Staunton, February 18 – The Debaltsevo kettle is coming to an end, Nikolay Mitrokhin says, and Ukraine is going to lose. Several thousand Ukrainian soldiers will “in the best case” become prisoners, enormous stockpiles of military equipment will be lost, and “the moral spirit will suffer from the strongest possible attack.” At the same time, […]
Ivan Rodichenko is a volunteer Ukrainian fighter with the Kiev Rus Territorial Defense Battalion. The following memoir was translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. See our report from August on this incident here. This was in July 2014, with the Kiev Rus 25th Battalion, not far from the Russian border in Chernihiv Region (Chernigov), 150 kilometers […]
I have called the year 2014 an annus horribilis, as opposed to the annus mirabilis 25 years ago that gave our part of the world the chance to opt for freedom and democracy. I hate numerology but it is really odd to see that a quarter of a century after the amazing flowering of democracy […]
Staunton, February 16 – If President Obama follows German Chancellor Merkel and doesn’t arm Ukraine, the US president will not only “be playing the role Putin has assigned to him” but he will also open the way toward an effort by Moscow to dominate the Baltic countries while threatening the world with first use of […]
Staunton, February 16 – Downsizing of government institutions and the firing of part of their staffs “threatens both liberals and the existing powers that be,” according to the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the first by depriving them of state support and the second by undercutting the support such people had been giving to the state. […]
Tuesday, February 17, 2015, will mark the 365th consecutive day of The Interpreter’s “Ukraine Live” coverage. To mark the occasion Matt Sienkiewicz, Assistant Professor of Communication and International Studies at Boston College, has written an analysis of the merits of liveblogging. Two poles dominate our current information environment. On one extreme there is the developing […]
Staunton, February 1 – Myroslav Marynovich, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group who spend a decade in the Soviet GULAG and is currently vice rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University, issued the statement below about how Ukrainians feel about what is happening to them now. It deserves to be read in full and is […]
Staunton, February 1 – There are denials, “non-denial denials,” and then denials that have the effect of confirming exactly what those doing the denying are seeking to disown and providing additional information as well. A classical example of the last is provided by the head of a Kremlin think tank who was trying to undercut […]
Staunton, February 14 – Most in Russia and many in the West are so used to thinking of fascism and especially Nazism as a phenomenon of the extreme right that they do not remember that Nazism was National Socialism and that until the Rohm Purge it was as much a movement of the left as […]
