Staunton, September 2 – Many people, horrified by the actions of pro-Moscow forces in Crimea and the Donbas or unwilling to continue to resist Russian aggression, have concluded that the rest of Ukraine would be better off without those two regions and could move forward by sacrificing them to Vladimir Putin. “If only everything were […]
Staunton, September 1 – Russians who fought as volunteers in the Donbass militias are returning home not only with their weapons but with increasingly violent dispositions, and according to three experts, they now represent a threat not only to public order but also to political stability. Valery Borshchev, a former Duma deputy, tells Novyye Izvestiya […]
Staunton, August 31 Like the citizens of most countries, Russians are generally prepared to sacrifice to support national security, but they can become outraged if they learn that money taken from programs that helped them and supposedly given to the military is being diverted as a result of corruption. And that can have immediate political […]
Staunton, September 1 In 1997, David King produced his magisterial volume on how the Soviets airbrushed out of pictures disgraced former officials entitled The Commissar Vanishes. But now, many had assumed that in the age of the Internet, no regime would have equal success in destroying information about the past. Indeed, for all too many, […]
Staunton, September 1 As Russian schools reopen, only three of Russia’s non-Russian nations – the Tatars, the Khakass and the Yakut — have government-approved textbooks in their native languages, something that makes a mockery of Moscow’s claims that it is supporting instruction in various subjects in 24 languages and offering language courses in 73 of […]
Staunton, September 1 – Having failed to find the number of backers for the Russian world in Ukraine it expected, Moscow in the opinion of many in Kyiv is seeking to use Ukrainian radicals in the pursuit of its goal of destabilizing Kyiv to the point that Ukraine will fall back into Russia’s orbit, according […]
Staunton, September 1 – The share of Russians who say they believe that the Russian security services were involved in organizing terrorist acts at Beslan and elsewhere has remained unchanged over the last year at four percent, according to Levada Center polls; but the number of those who think these services knew in advance and […]
Staunton, September 1 – All the residents of the Mari El village of Maly Shaplak have decided to protest the fact that the Russian postal service has not delivered mail to them or to neighboring villages for more than a year by deciding not to take part in the upcoming elections. The authorities are ignoring […]
Staunton, August 29 – The three most important news items last week, two URA.ru journalists say, is that unemployment among Russians aged 15 to 24 years has risen 500 percent this year, that one in every three of them is ready to leave the country, and that ever more of them are animated by a […]
Staunton, August 16 – Sixty-four percent of Ukrainians say they want to join the Western alliance, according to a new poll conducted by the Kucheriv Democratic Initiative and the Razumkov Center. And they want to, Vitaly Portnikov says, because its borders are today the borders of the civilized world that no aggressor would even think […]
