Staunton, 1 June – If the leaders of Kazakhstan or Belarus adopt policies like those Ukraine did, there is no guarantee that those two countries might suffer the fate that the eastern regions of Ukraine are now facing, according to Valery Tishkov, director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and a former Russian […]
Staunton, May 6 – When Ukraine and Moldova declared their intention to sign association agreements with the European Union, Vladimir Putin reacted by speeding up his timetable for the creation of his own Eurasian Union, but that change in schedule may have the unexpected result of delaying or even undermining the formation of that Moscow-led […]
Staunton, May 3 – Despite Moscow’s promises and expectations, its Customs Union is “clearly insufficient for stimulating cooperation in the Russian-Kazakhstan border regions,” according to a Russian expert. For that to change, he says the two sides would have to develop something like the EU’s Euro-Region program — something they are very from doing. The […]
Staunton, May 2 – Two months ago, Mariya Snegova, a Russian sociologist at Columbia University, suggested that Vladimir Putin was drawing on Mikhail Yuryev’s 2006 novel, The Third Empire, as a guide to his moves against Ukraine and as a source for a new imperial ideology. Snegova’s conclusions about the impact of Yuryev’s thinking on […]
Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Makey, the Belarusian foreign minister, continued to distance Minsk from Moscow by saying that his country seeks a “balance” between Europe and Russia, a statement to a Prague paper that underscores the concerns of Belarus about its own fate in the wake of Moscow’s Crimean Anschluss and Minsk’s new efforts […]
Staunton, April 28 – Many Russians believe and many in the West accept the notion that Ukrainians and Belarusians are offshoots of the formation and growth of the Russian nation, a reflection of a sometimes innocent confusion between nation building and state building but often as now the result of Kremlin efforts to rewrite history […]
Staunton, April 22 – It is a measure of just how worried the leaders of countries bordering Russia are about the possibility that Vladimir Putin will build on his Crimean Anschluss by moving against their states that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka feels the need to deny that Minsk is oppressing ethnic Russians and to call on […]
Staunton, April 13 – The vehemence of Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s opposition to Moscow’s proposal for the federalization of Ukraine suggests that this Russian demand may not be an ad hoc position reflecting uniquely Ukrainian situation but part of a broader strategy to break and ultimately re-subordinate neighboring countries. Not only would such an approach […]
This article is co-written by Luke Rodeheffer and Devin Ackles. Admist the chaos in Ukraine, the leaders of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia recently convened in Astana as part of the Eurasian Economic Commission. Beyond the upbeat statements from the troika’s leaders, one topic that remains a source of anxiety is how effectively a common labor […]
Staunton, April 4 – Organizers have collected some 1500 signatures on an Internet petition calling for a referendum on the transfer of part of Russia’s Smolensk Region to neighboring Belarus, a step they say would correct an “historic injustice” because that area belonged to Belarus before World War II and one that echoes what Vladimir […]
