Staunton, November 9 – Most people who predict the disintegration of the Russian Federation focus on ethnicity, but in fact, as the situation in Karelia shows, ethnicity plays a much smaller role in mobilizing the population to defend itself against Moscow than do competitive elections, Vadim Shtepa says. “Real regionalism,” the Karelian activist and commentator […]
Staunton, June 19 – Not having found any evidence that the Young Karelia (“Nuori Karjala”) movement has taken money from Finland as anonymous sources had claimed, justice ministry officials in Petrozavodsk nonetheless argue that it should be declared “a foreign agent” because it had received a grant from the UN and hosted visitors from abroad. […]
Staunton, March 5 – The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to suggest that old rules and old expectations no longer apply and thereby increase uncertainty and fear. That explains why someone like Kseniya Sobchak has suggested that she is next on Putin’s list now that the Kremlin has killed Boris Nemtsov and why an […]
On February 10, Marina Perevozkina of Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK) published an interview with former intelligence officer Leonid Reshetnikov, now director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI) headlined “Idea of Minsk Agreements was Born in Finland.” It is a fascinating expose of the role some American scholars of Russia played in the confidential preludes to […]
Staunton, February 5 — Some in the West and even in Ukraine are urging Kyiv to accept Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and its formation of “peoples republics” in the Donbas in order to resolve the crisis, but such calls are dangerously wrong because if Kyiv agrees to Moscow’s demands, Moscow will only make more, […]
Staunton, December 17 — Karelian nationalists who call for the independence of their republic and raise “unnecessary and harmful questions about additional state languages” there are being “seriously underestimated” as a threat to Petrozavodsk and Moscow, according to Sergey Pirozhnikov, a deputy in the republic legislative assembly. The reason that this small group is so […]
Staunton, November 30 – Seventy-five years ago, Moscow launched what became known as the Winter War against Finland. It used much the same propaganda and tactics it is using against Ukraine now. It faced far greater resistance than its vast disproportion of forces had led it to believe. And thanks to that resistance, it achieved […]
Staunton, October 16 – Citing the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty between Moscow and Helsinki, Russia took control of a 1.78 hectare undeveloped parcel of land in Finland’s Aaland Islands in 2009 and transferred it to Vladimir Putin’s office, according to Jarmo Ratia, a former Finnish official who said he was talking now because of “changes […]
Staunton, September 24 – Like its Soviet predecessors, the Putin regime has adopted three strategies in dealing with the non-Russian quarter of the population: increasing repression, divide-and-rule efforts within these communities and among them, and suppressing the dissemination of information about their plight. But these strategies are proving less effective than they once were, the […]
