Staunton, July 27 – Having taken the measure of the West and found it wanting, Vladimir Putin has expanded his aggression from the military occupation of Crimea to the organization of irredentist insurgencies in eastern Ukraine to the shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner to the shelling of Ukrainian targets from the territory of the […]
The majority of this article was written by Pierre Vaux, with significant contributions by James Miller and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. All translations by Pierre Vaux except those marked with *, which are translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. Russia’s military and intelligence sector has been actively involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine for months, as […]
Staunton, May 25 – The essential dishonesty of the Kremlin’s propaganda message is so blatant and so easy to unmask given the Internet and the ugliness of the ideas Moscow is pushing are “not appealing” to the West. But Vladimir Putin’s “ideological newspeak based on disinformation falls on fertile socio-cultural ground in the East,” a […]
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 22 – In what is becoming a defining feature of the Putin regime, the Russian authorities are saying things that many people want to hear at exactly the same moment that they are doing things that directly contradict what they say. Today, the victims of that are the Crimean Tatars, a Moscow commentator […]
Staunton, April 14 – The Kremlin’s insistence that ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in southeastern Ukraine are acting on their own rather than under the direction of Moscow as seems to be the case could blow up in Vladimir Putin’s face by leading Russians in Russian regions to ask the same questions about how they […]
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 […]
Staunton, April 13 – For the last several years, many Russian commentators have talked about Russians who have converted to Islam and thereby become even more anti-Russian than ordinary Muslims. Now, a Russian nationalist is focusing on the reality that at least some ethnic Russians are assimilating to other nations and following the same path. […]
Staunton, April 10 – The majority of Russians support the annexation of Crimea but do not understand the implications of that action and are “not willing to suffer the consequences,” according to Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Center, the leading independent polling group in the Russian Federation. In a report issued this week, […]
Staunton, April 8 – Many in both Moscow and the West believe that the US destroyed the USSR by driving down oil prices and could do the same thing with the Russian Federation now, but in fact, the West did not deploy the oil weapon that effectively in the past and could not do so […]
