Staunton, January 21 – After declaring in December that they felt diminished by the fact that Belarusian believers felt insulted by the fact that the Orthodox Church in their country did not have self-administering status, the leadership of the Belarusian exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has shelved the issue for the next 25 to […]
Staunton, January 7 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s very public invocation of religion and his tight embrace of Patriarch Kirill, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has fallen over the last year, the result of government policies which could be called “covert secularization” and the spread of the notion of “Orthodox atheism,” according to Boris […]
Staunton, January 14 – Moscow has unleashed a powerful wave of “black propaganda” against Belarus, often using Belarusians who now live in the Russian Federation to do it. But that effort, ostensibly designed to counter Western and Ukrainian propaganda, is alienating Belarusians and making cooperation between the two countries in the union state more difficult. […]
Staunton, January 11 – Ten months after the Anschluss of Crimea, the Russian occupation authorities have succeeded in changing that Ukrainian peninsula to such an extent that Crimea now resembles Belarus, a place where one can live “in sufficient comfort” as long as one doesn’t have “any need to have any contact with the state,” […]
Staunton, December 25 – In his Christmas message, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of the 1.5 million Roman Catholics in Belarus, called on the faithful not to be afraid of the current situation, echoing the words of the late Pope John Paul II to Poles at the beginning of his pontificate. Shortly after his election […]
Staunton, December 22 – Vladimir Putin has agreed with proposals by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to require the heads of the federal subjects to bear responsibility for mobilization and fighting against diversionary forces, a step that makes them into something like tsarist-era governors general and could presage a new territorial delimitation of the country. At […]
Staunton, December 22 — Belarusian nationalists over the last year “not only have come out of ‘the political ghetto’ into which they have been since the end of the 1990s but also have become an influential political force” in Minsk, indeed a force that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka has had to take into consideration and play […]
Staunton, December 15 – Even as Moscow appears to be reducing its military actions in southeastern Ukraine, a “reduction” that is at least in part a disinformation campaign, Putin is making Belarus into a base for attacking Kyiv. The appearance of more Russian “little green men” in Gomel last week prompted some Ukrainians to ask […]
Staunton, November 28 – Analysts and officials in both Moscow and the West have long operated under the assumption that Russia will always be able to retain Belarus as a reliable satellite. But recent statements by Alyaksandr Lukashenko and actions by Belarusian nationalists are raising questions about that assumption. In an article yesterday on the […]
Staunton, October 23 – In the course of a discussion of why he argues Moscow will have to reverse the Anschluss of Crimea at the end of Russia’s war with Ukraine, Andrey Illarionov says that the Russian government could lose many other disputed territories to neighboring countries. The Russian commentator lists the following territories which […]
