Tag: Abkhazia

In Russia This Week, you will find links to the stories of Russia Update in the last week and to special features, plus an article following up on the news and trending topics below. Top Stories: –Volunteer Urals Fighters Return Home from ‘Lugansk People’s Republic’ –Residents of Chita Assemble to Protest Governor’s Inaction as Wildfire […]

A year ago on March 18, 2014, just two days after the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech to his constituents and State Duma deputies regarding the referendum vote that made historical headlines. Despite reverberating criticism from the West and shock from Ukraine, Putin reiterated to his audience that the referendum […]

Staunton, February 25 — When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, the United States and other Western countries and with the support of the leaderships of the former Soviet republics, including the Russian Federation, insisted that the administrative borders of the union republics should become without change the international borders of the new states. The West […]

Staunton, February 24 – The war in Ukraine must be seen as a direct “continuation” of the decay and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Russia and many other of the countries which emerged from it to develop the kind of political institutions necessary for stability, according to Moscow commentator Ivan Sukhov. […]

Staunton, February 6 – In their rush to end the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, Western governments are in danger of creating a far larger and long-lasting problem for the region and themselves in the future, according to Bacho Korchilava, because if the West legitimates a role for Russia in the Donbas, Moscow will be able […]

Staunton, November 25 – The Russian-Ukrainian war now going on could have begun in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The fact that it didn’t says a great deal about the attitudes of Russian political leaders then and how much they have changed in the intervening period, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov. In a post on […]

Staunton, November 19 – Faced with a united front in the West, Andrey Piontkovsky says, Putin may seek “to freeze the Ukrainian conflict and then to save face as a patriot of ‘the Russian world’ decide to take certain steps in the Caucasus as he is doing now,” something that threatens all three of the […]

Staunton, November 16 – Demonstrations in Tbilisi and Kyiv on November 15 are the latest and most public indication of a development that not only challenges Vladimir Putin’s seizure of territory in Georgia and Ukraine but also calls into question Russia’s earlier occupation of other non-Russian lands. Moscow has always tried to deal with its […]

Staunton, November 13 – “The victory of pro-Russian forces in Georgia would be a catastrophe not only for Georgia,” Gela Vasadze, the head of the Svobodnaya Zona portal, says, because that development, one actively promoted by Moscow, would also cut off Azerbaijan, Central Asia and China from a land route to Europe bypassing Russia. Vasadze’s […]

This past week during the prolonged battle for the Donetsk Airport, there has been a series of Russian-backed separatist propaganda videos, as well as Russian state TV news programs reporting from the same scenes and using militants’ footage. These have been widely discussed on social media because they give away the fact that the militants […]