Staunton, September 17 – Vladimir Putin has no need of Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Crimea, Aleksandr Podrabinek says. He has moved against all of them “not for territory but for his own self-assertion and personal power, things which only the state of war can guarantee him.” That is how Putin began his rise to […]
Staunton, August 22 – Russians are less inclined to believe that Moscow’s recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was useful to Russia and to think that the annexation by their country of these two breakaway republics would be a good idea, yet another echo of Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. […]
Staunton, July 1 – In the wake of the Crimean Anschluss, many Russians have predicted and many Ukrainians have been fearful that Ukraine could disintegrate as a country as a result of the actions of the Russian government and its agents in Eastern Ukraine. Exactly how that might happen and thus what Ukraine should do […]
Staunton, June 27 – The Russian military was ready to invade Ukraine in April but stopped short of doing so, Pavel Felgengauer, a leading independent military analyst in Moscow, says. Now it is not and probably won’t be until the middle of July at the earliest “regardless of what happens in Ukraine. Felgengauer’s comments came […]
Staunton, June 17 – In the corridors of the Russian foreign ministry, commentator Ruslan Gorevoy says, people are saying that Moscow would hardly have annexed Crimea if other separatist movements had not appeared elsewhere in Ukraine that Moscow could use as leverage against Kyiv and block its turn toward the West. In the new issue […]
Staunton, June 10 – Over the last several days, many in the West have professed to see Moscow pulling back from its subversive aggression against Ukraine and expressed confidence that the crisis Vladimir Putin’s actions there have caused is approaching an end that both Russia and the West will be able to live with, however […]
Staunton, June 6 – Vladimir Putin has adopted the rhetoric of national self-determination and federalism in Ukraine, but a leading Russian regionalist site says that this is “hypocrisy and a farce” which should deceive no one and especially not regionalists and federalists in Russia because it is only “a cover for an aggressive imperial policy.” […]
Staunton, 3 June – In an echo of the success Abkhazians had in pressing for the ouster of their republic’s leader, 271 delegates to a May 31 meeting in Makhachkala calling itself “the Extraordinary Congress of the Peoples of Dagestan” has demanded that Moscow fire Ramazan Abdulatipov as republic head and replace him with one […]
Local residents say that several dozen residents of Chechnya, who took part in the fighting in Ukraine and died in the Donetsk region, have been brought back to their homeland in the last few days, giving numbers from 35 to 40-45 dead. The Republic’s security agencies declined to comment on these reports, writes a correspondent […]
Staunton, May 29 – As unwelcome as the crisis in Abkhazia is for the Russian government given its focus on Ukraine, a Moscow commentator says, the Kremlin has no choice but to intervene and force Aleksandr Ankvab to enter into dialogue with the opposition. If it doesn’t, the problems in Abkhazia will spread to South […]
