Staunton, January 20 – “Import substitution” may be the most important new term to enter Russian discourse over the last year, but it isn’t going to happen in the next year, experts say, and the reasons for that are to be found in the actions and inactions of the central Russian government in Moscow. Dmitry […]
Staunton, January 20 – Even as observers try to keep track of the shifting lines of the front in Donetsk and at the airport there, a more frightening form of conflict is spreading across Ukraine – a partisan-style war in other parts of that country that will give Moscow additional leverage on Kyiv while complicating […]
Staunton, January 19 – A Russian blogger has gathered pictures of homemade signs in Russian Orthodox churches, signs which carry injunctions that are nowhere to be found in the Bible, as he points out. (See TsarValera, also re-posted here. Among them are the following: “Brothers and Sisters! Don’t use Orthodox newspapers as toilet paper. That […]
Staunton, January 13 – The continuing dominance of an imperial mentality among Russians and their failure to consolidate as a nation reflects the fact that the Russian state became an empire before the Russian people came together as a nation, according to Yevgeny Anisimov, a scholar at the St. Petersburg Institute of History. In a […]
Staunton, January 18 – Even as some in the West are thinking about how to rebuild their relationships with Moscow, Yevgeny Savostyanov, the former head of the Moscow FSB, says that what Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine will have a far deeper, longer-lasting and more negative impact on relations between Russia and the West. […]
On January 8, before the terrorists believed responsible were even caught, the mainstream Russian media ran an interview in which a noted political commentator explicitly blamed U.S. intelligence for the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo‘s Paris office on January 7. The extended interview with Alexey Martynov was carried on LifeNews.ru, which is not state-run but which follows the […]
A Comment on the Involvement of the Patriot of Ukraine in the Ukrainian Revolution Adrian Karatnycky, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has written a good article, titled “Warlords and armed groups threaten Ukraine’s rebuilding“, in which he discusses important issues related to today’s Ukraine. In March this year, I wrote that the newly-elected (then acting) government […]
Staunton, January 6 – Despite its much ballyhooed success in preventing any attack on the Sochi Olympics, the FSB has not had a good year in Ukraine, where its military competitor the GRU played the dominant role in the annexation of Crime and where its inability to predict developments in Ukraine constituted an intelligence failure […]
Staunton, January 6 – Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has largely disappeared from the front pages of Western newspapers and the lead stories of Western news broadcasts, a development reflecting the short attention span of many people but one that gives the Kremlin leader a victory because this lowers pressure on governments to oppose Russia’s […]
Staunton, January 1 – Hector Alos i Font, a Catalonian linguist who has been working in Chuvashia, says that the Chuvash language has improved its position relative to Russian as measured by signs put out for the New Year’s holiday, but that the language of the titular nationality has a long way to go before […]
