Staunton, September 28 – Just as it did in Ukraine, Moscow is preparing again to play the citizenship card in Estonia and Latvia, muddying the waters as to who is “a Russian” and who is thus part of Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” and worthy of Moscow’s defense whether any of them want that “defense” or […]
Staunton, July 11 – Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta is reporting today that resistance among officials in Russian-occupied Crimea to giving up Ukrainian citizenship has led the Russian labor ministry to seek a delay until the beginning of next year of a requirement announced in April that all officials on the peninsula do so or lose their […]
Staunton, June 26 – Only 5,000 of the 300,000 Crimean Tatars living in the Russian-occupied peninsula have applied for Russian passports over the last ten days, according to the Russian official there responsible for nationality affairs. That figure reflects the steadfast opposition of the Crimean Tatars to the Russian Anschluss. These officials say that applications […]
Staunton, April 23 – Not only have the number of people in the former non-Russian republics identifying as ethnic Russians fallen dramatically since 1991, but the number who speak Russian or who study it in school has fallen precipitously as well, a trend that means Vladimir Putin is reaching out to an ever-smaller group and […]
Staunton, April 20 – Russian actions in eastern Ukraine are intensifying anti-Russian feelings among Ukrainians living there, deepening a divide between the Ukrainian and Russian communities there even as some in Moscow question whether the Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine should be considered ethnic Russians at all. That Moscow’s moves in Ukraine are infuriating Ukrainians […]
Staunton, April 18 – Many Russians and others have struggled with the fact that the Russian word for ethnic Russian (russky) and the one for those who are not ethnically Russian but part of the Russian political space (rossiisky) are not the same, a reflection of the multi-national composition of the Russian state, tsarist, communist […]
