Staunton, December 14 – A country or group of countries which declares itself to be a federation but does not give that term real content is at risk of falling apart, while one that does not only will retain all its parts but become an attractive model for people around the world, according to Vadim […]
Staunton, December 9 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s call for the federalization of Ukraine and Petro Poroshenko’s suggestion that he is prepared to oversee steps toward the decentralization of power in his country, nothing can be done toward either under the current crisis conditions, according to Moscow’s leading expert on Ukraine. Bogdan Bezpalko, deputy director of […]
Staunton, September 29 – Vladimir Putin’s decision to end direct elections for mayors in the name of increasing central control will in fact have the opposite effect, Roman Revunov says, because it will allow governors to amass unprecedented power and be in a position to challenge Moscow or even lead their regions out of the […]
Staunton, September 3 – Kiev’s failure to take into consideration the opinions of part of the residents of the Donbass is Moscow’s fault because the Russian government has “done everything in order to discredit real and civilized protest by putting in its place banditry and armed aggression,” according to Russian commentator Kseniya Kirillova. In a […]
Staunton, September 2 – Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has “unexpectedly” allowed Tatarstan to retain its presidency and thus “again confirm its status as a special region within Russia, ‘an exception from the rules,’ as former Federal Council speaker Sergey Mironov put it, and thus, “a bastion of federalism” within Russia, according to a Muslim […]
Staunton, August 26 – Russian government media outlets pushed demands for the federalization of Ukraine after the Kremlin indicated that was what Vladimir Putin wanted and then almost as quickly toned down its promotion of that idea apparently after it began to resonate in the regions of the Russian Federation itself. At the request of […]
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. […]
Updated Daily. Chechen Leader Ramzan Kadyrov joined the “Night Wolves,” a bikers’ gang that Putin has favored. Russian press and social media mined the popular social media network VKontakte for information on Russian paratroopers said to be killed or captured in Lugansk Region in Ukraine; oddly, some pictures were removed of armored vehicles and a […]
Staunton, August 18 – Yesterday, Russian police blocked the march in Novosibirsk calling for Moscow to live up to the constitution and observe the rights of the country’s federal subjects, but the Putin regime failed to block the message of the Siberian federalists from getting out. Not only did the actions of the police underscore […]
Staunton, August 13 – Despite Moscow’s apparently successful efforts to block a march in Novosibirsk this Sunday, the Russian authorities have failed to prevent the ideas behind it from spreading not only to other Siberian cities like Yekaterinburg but also and more seriously to Kaliningrad and Kuban. Feliks Rivkin, an activist in Yekaterinburg, says that […]
